Nunc enim sermo de toto est

December 13, 2017

I wrote a commemoration of William H. Gass for n+1, focusing in particular on his training as a philosopher and on the significance of this training for his life's work. To read the whole thing, go here.

William Howard Gass, who died on December 6 at the age of 93, is one of the very few philosophers of the 20th century to transcend the essential boringness of that social identity. What university committees did he serve on? What was his teaching load? What was the “impact factor” of the journals he published in? Who cares. Gass, who completed his dissertation under the supervision of the analytic philosopher Max Black at Cornell University in 1954, and who worked for a short time with (to the extent that one could work with) Ludwig Wittgenstein, also wrote what is perhaps the greatest, bleakest, most rigorous, and finely calibrated American novel of his era, 1995’s The Tunnel. Impact factor: either “incalculable,” or “n/a,” depending on your view of disciplinary boundaries.

Yet his literary output must not be seen as an abandonment of his earlier trajectory. Idiosyncrasy is the integrity of genius, it is sometimes said. Gass was writing philosophy the only way he could. His principal preoccupation in philosophy was with metaphor, which you might think is a perfect point at which to bring philosophy and literature into conversation. You might think this, until you read Black on the subject, writing around the same time Gass was completing his graduate work under him: “To draw attention to a philosopher’s metaphors,” Black observes, “is to belittle him—like praising a logician for his beautiful handwriting.” He concludes that while metaphors are unavoidable and might sometimes be harnessed for salutary ends, they are, in general, dangerous, “and perhaps especially in philosophy.”

It is not hard to imagine young Gass chafing at the bit that midcentury analytic philosophy had sought to place in his mouth...

August 20, 2017

I recently found myself at an academic conference that featured a presentation by graduate students on “combating racism with humor.” We were made to watch a video clip of a theater piece they had performed in connection with an anti-racism event. The skit depicted corporate executives planning an ad campaign associating the efficacy of soap products with their power to make people of color white. I found myself pitying the students. They had obviously overestimated their ability to change the world. But they were also, it seemed to me, tragically unaware of what humor is. They were mistaking it for a tool to be deployed in the pursuit of real-world ends: closing the gap between the powerful and the powerless, ensuring payback time for the fat cats, sticking it to the man.

It is hard to blame them. They were under the grip of a widespread illusion, expressed by Garry Trudeau along with countless others after the murder of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists in 2015, that humor only achieves its highest purpose when it “punches up”—that is, when it involves the powerless kicking back against the powerful. But to insist that a joke is not funny because it punches down is a category mistake. It is to deploy standards of justice where justice is not at issue. We see an analogous mistake when philistines judge that, say, a crucifix photographed in a jar of urine is, to the extent that it is offensive, not art. “That’s not funny” is the comedic equivalent of “that’s not art”—both are statements that can be made only by people who don’t understand the thing they are talking about.

I am entering the silverback stage of life, and at this point it is surely a variety of punching down—or, as we used to say, it is undignified—to berate graduate students. It is getting to be time for me to cede my place to them, I know, and to acknowledge that other meaning of “humor,” according to which young people’s internal passages are coursing with fluids, while the old, as Robert Burton said in The Anatomy of Melancholy, are quite dry. We have different humoral constitutions than the young, and so it is fitting that we should also have a different sense of humor. I happen to be dessicating moreover in a critical moment of history that has compelled me to rethink everything I long took for granted about humor: what it is, what it is for and whom it should target...

May 27, 2017

Imagine you are in an urban park. Look around. How many animals do you see? I’d imagine you see a few birds, a dog or two, perhaps some insects, and a dozen or so humans. Now how many plants do you see? You could not even begin to count, nor to say where one leaves off and another begins.

I am standing in the train station in Karlsuhe, on my way back to Paris from Wolfenbüttel. Even here I see: a few dozen humans, about as many pigeons, a good deal of concrete and iron. And off in the distance I see, again, countless trees, defining, in more ways than one, the horizon of my perception. I see grass pushing up through the gravel between the tracks. Over a stone wall bounding the station to one side an ivy or vine plant of some sort tumbles: it is not moving, visibly, but one might easily imagine it striving, grasping its way toward our platform. And this is a completely dominated space, this is nearly as close as we can get to the longed-for suppression of the vegetal.

We passively suppose that plants and animals are the two equal parts of living nature, the two kingdoms, two moieties each taking half the territory. Of course this does not stand up to scrutiny. I read somewhere that in terms of biomass Earth’s aquatic life is around 90% animal (and this mostly krill), and 10% vegetal, while among the terrestrials it is roughly the reverse. But this seems to give far too great a share to land animals.

Wherever there is a portion of the Earth’s surface that is covered predominantly with animals, there is a problem, an ecological anomaly. Even pods of gregarious walruses need to clear off the beach before too long, lest they destroy whatever balance was there before them. And this is not to mention factory farms with their billions of cows, or cities with their billions of people. Yet wherever there is a portion of the Earth’s surface that is covered predominantly with plants, there is, simply, nature.

Plant life is the paradigm and the general rule of life itself; animal life is the exception.

Aristotle thought animals are more perfect than plants, because they are capable of locomotion, and so form is able to separate from matter in them to a certain degree. He left it to his disciple Theophrastus to do the systematic botanical work that he himself had neglected for zoology. In 1699 Edward Tyson complained that Europeans were now ransacking 'both the Indies' in search of medicinal plants to feed the nascent pharmaceutical industry, rather than paying attention to nature’s most excellent productions, the animals. We’ve shifted to plants as the primary focus of our interest, perhaps, Tyson complains, but only in view of what we can get out of them, not in view of what they are. Aristotle said in defense of his researches in marine biology: ‘Here too dwell gods’. No one who descends from him has yet said such a thing about plants.

What is ontologically distinctive about plants is that they can be cut up in all kinds of ways without thereby ceasing to exist. If you cut off my arm, I am not 10% less the person I was before, and in that respect I am ontologically quite distinct from a sack of flour or any other aggregate; but if you cut off my head, I am 100% less the person I was before. A branch is not analogous to an arm, and there is nothing in a plant that even suggests itself for analogy to the head. Evolutionary theory suggests that this diffuseness, and this full perfection of the pars pro toto principle, whereby any part is as useful as any other for yielding up a complete and perfect representative of the kind, is simply an adaptation to what would otherwise be the disadvantages of sessility: plants have no brain or central nervous system, or any absolutely crucial organs of higher functioning at all, but this saves them the trouble of having to run away from predators without end, protecting their precious jewels. They can stay where they are, be chewed down to a mere sliver of what they were before, and go right on living and growing.

Plants do not have nerve ganglia. But whatever it is about nerve ganglia that makes us sentient is underlain by chemical activity. There is no reason in principle why the chemical transmissions in plants could not be their own neurophysiology.

But, some will insist, it is willed motion, going this way rather than that, that makes a being a being of moral interest, and plants, as we’ve noted, just stay where they are. Well, the boundary between locomotion and change of quantity is not so clear. Plants do get around. Just make a quick biodiversity survey, again, of your local park.

We can’t individuate them, and that troubles us, causes us to look away, or to filter them out. Plants do not so much outnumber animals, as outspread them. The dramatis personae of nature are the animals — this lion, that peccary — and plants are only the stage-setting. Sometimes we can make out what look like individual trees (we even call them ‘proud’), but that’s just a stroke of ecological luck for us, and it hides what is really going on. We know that individuality is not what is really going on with animals either — we are not individuals, but biomes —, yet our ability to move around as one, our ‘proportion of rest and motion’, gives us a sort of unity that makes our talk of this lion, that peccary, seem to reflect the true order of things.

But look around the park again. How can the true order of things be represented by such a vanishingly small share of living nature?

We force plants into the background, pretend not to notice them, because we have no clear way, yet, of speaking about a morally relevant nature except as an assemblage of morally relevant individuals, moving around on their own and pursuing their own interests: earthly gods. If we were to say, of plants, ‘Here too dwell gods’, this could only be in the spirit of pantheism: ‘Here too dwells of god’, in the partitive genitive sense in which one can say, in French, du thé, de la boue, des fleurs.

Plants are there for their own sake, though in recent evolutionary history they have made some overtures to animals, to appeal to animals on terms that animals, whether bees or humans, seem to get. For 400 million years or so there were animals, but still no flowers. And now today we can say: ‘Look at that beautiful rose!’, ‘What a lovely tulip!’

Most of us are not ready for pantheism. We are prepared to see God in a rose, but really would rather not experience the god of the rainforest, of the whole great thing. We rationalise this avoidance as if it were a particular fear of particular dangers, of spiders or snakes. We turn ecology into a practical concern to keep the planet in a condition that can continue to sustain us, and in order to convince others of the importance of plants in this balance we transform them rhetorically into animal organs: the ‘lungs’ of the Earth.

It is reasonable to suppose that the ransacking will go on for as long as plants are conceptualised only as the life-support system of animals, whether this is in terms of pharmacology or of ecology. Somewhat more speculatively, it does not seem implausible that evolution should have contrived a way for them to derive something like joy from the chemical transmissions that keep them doing what they do: putting out their pollen and their roots, absorbing the light of the sun and transforming it into what makes up their own nature: eating light, as has been said.

It seems phenomenologically undeniable, if you will just stop and look, that this planet is theirs.

What I am saying can only come across as foolish, like the effusions of an investment banker just returned from an ayahuasca retreat, or the small-talk of a 1970s suburbanite who has just read The Secret Life of Plants; like the philosophers who are bracketed by many as fun or zany, who speak of 'rhizomes', and who in the end turn out to be interested in plants more as metaphors for something else than in plants as plants. Is this not always how it is with the fun and zany philosophers? Just when you think they are talking about something that interests you, it turns out they were only riffing on it, on the way to talking about something altogether different; well, me, I want to talk about plants. Deleuze speaks of rhizomes and wants to tell us that society is like a field of grass, but in the end this is not so different from a medieval courtier who might have declared that the sovereign, the embodiment of political power, is mighty like a lion. We would be mistaken to take this as a lesson in zoology.

Kant said that there would never be a Newton for the blade of grass, and a strong case can be made that this point was not simply an expression of the relative primitiveness of the life sciences in the late 18th century (he speaks as though what interests him are 'organised beings' in general, yet whenever he goes in search of an example of what it is that makes these so unfathomable, it is the blade of grass or the tree --and not the parrot or the crustacean, which he treats rather as irreducible 'works' of nature than as representatives of life as such-- that comes to mind). It may be that he meant that, even when we understand the nature and causes of grass, thanks to Darwin and Mendel and Watson and Crick and all the other successors, we will still feel certain that we have not really comprehended the thing in question. Philosophy since Kant has had trouble knowing what to do with those things for which there can be no Newton. I take it that Kant's general line, though, was that it is a tremendous mistake to leave what cannot be comprehended to those who don't understand or respect the limits of comprehension.

I am aware that to insist on the importance of plants is a species of Schwärmerei. But that something that is patently true, phenomenologically and scientifically, can only sound foolish when it is made explicit, is itself a measure of the impoverishment of what I might dare to call our natural philosophy, not a judgment of the quality of the observation. Plants would be at the center of any adequate natural philosophy, not off on the fringes with the stoners and the enthusiasts. And natural philosophy would be at the center of any adequate philosophy: an analysis of what earthly existence is really like for us, and of what is to count as ‘us’.

March 23, 2017

Your heart burns for me so and your body and your soul burn with desire for me and for my body and my face. Here is what I am referring to: Selivanko and Mikheiko and Yakovets Boldykin took my three-ruble horse, and the leather saddle of a ruble and a half,and this took place in the forest on such and such day between the mountains and the hills. My heart burns for you so and my body and my soul burn with desire for you and for your body and your face.

November 12, 2016

California is drawn deep blue, when conceived as a whole, but drawn at the county level it is as multifarious and fractured as the country itself. I spent a good portion of the late summer in the heart of California’s own Trump territory, in the high desert town of Barstow. I was there to attend to my father in the weeks leading up to his death at the local veterans’ hospital. Nor was this my first stay in a part of the state that supports Trump. I grew up in the town of Rio Linda, the butt of one of Rush Limbaugh’s most long-running jokes— an early lesson to me, when I first heard it around 1990, of the strange relationship between right-wing elitism and right-wing populism. Rio Linda was a hotbed of Klan recruitment, and I personally knew some of its initiates, though my friends were mostly Mexican-American punks and goths. Those were formative years for me, in Trumpland, and I feel they give me sufficient credibility to speak with authority on that dispersed part of America, even as I write from Paris.

I’ve been thinking incessantly over the past few days about what to do: declare that I’ll never return to America, or rush back to do what I can to change it; declare my enmity to everyone who voted for Trump, or declare that them’s my folks and y’all are misunderstanding us. One just reels too much at moments of such historical turmoil to be able to produce anything like a coherent plan.

I am struck, right now, by how much my effort to comprehend the rise of Trump is coloured by my memories of Barstow this summer, by what I see now as a presentiment I felt then of what was to come. My father’s last words to me, or very nearly, were a quotation from a certain Douglas Adams novel: ‘So long’, he said, ‘and thanks for all the fish’. At the time I took it as a funny, if basically empty, reference to our shared popular-cultural reference points. A friend reminded me, when I told him about this later, that in the novel the dolphins express their gratitude for all the fish as they are departing from the earth, and they are leaving because the earth is nearing its cataclysmic end. And I can’t help but think, now, that this is what lay at the heart of the presentiment: that I knew my father was ducking out, now, out of America and out of the world, because the time was right, because his own biology was attuned to the demise of his historical epoch, and all those left alive were tumbling headlong into a great historical void.

My father was definitely no Trumpist. He was a stubbornly independent-minded man who thought most people were full of shit, and who valued nothing more than good, honest, ‘authentic’ folk. He knew which of the two groups Trump belonged to, while his paragon of authenticity and goodness toward the end of his life were the Mexican people who surrounded him in his expat community of Lake Chapala, in Jalisco state. He was also extremely disappointed by American culture, and by the elite political class that, he felt, had left him and his kind with so little. He listened to media that spoke of dark forces behind the scenes, keeping all the power and the wealth. He had his picture taken with the dirty, toxic, shameful Alex Jones at some conference in San Antonio, but assured us that ‘that guy has some ideas that are really out there’. Move a few steps closer to the source of the sort of things my father echoed about the people who are controlling things behind the scenes, and you will find overt and evil anti-Semitic propaganda. I sincerely do not believe that he was aware of this connection.

He was surrounded in Lake Chapala by a number of fairly hardened American men, some of whom I got to know during my handful of visits there: Vietnam vets with eye-patches and missing limbs, who spoke of the need to stock up on gold and on canned food, who hated political correctness. The air was just as thick down Mexico way as in Barstow and in Rio Linda with the sort of sentiments that would propel Trump to power. And this is where things get complicated, for me and in reality. Many of those men love Mexico too, not as entitled white retirees love paradisiac resorts, but as men who think of themselves as lowly and alienated, as on the receiving end of a life of blows coming from the well-connected and wealthy, and who melt into a culture that they feel has room for them, who start families and love their Mexican children, who love Spanish and who love in Spanish. Educated liberals will demonise them for targeting subaltern women in stereotyped and stereotyping ways, yet from their point of view, I am certain, it is not objectification at all, but love. One of the most hardened and politically reactionary of all of them had a disabled child, whom he struggled to send to the United States for medical care. This child was, one might suppose, the very embodiment of everything the Trumpists despise as subhuman, yet there she was: generated and raised up and loved by a man who himself surely believes that Hillary Clinton is a puppet of Alan Greenspan, who is a pawn of George Soros, who is... well, you know.

So, it’s complicated, far more complicated than it appears from within the enclaves of blue America. I have recently said that everyone who helped to bring Trump to power is my ‘enemy’, while everything I am saying here might seem to be an attempt to mitigate that. But I mean what I say. Wars turn brother against brother. True historical crises tear us apart, whether we love each other or not. Those who propelled Trump to power are bursting with love, just like you are, just like the kids sobbing right now, so I’m told, on Harvard Yard. Many of them had no idea what evil they were helping to unleash. They love, and are worthy of love, and they must be defeated.

September 17, 2016

The dolphin fish (Coryphaenahippurus) has no inner life, so its death can only play out on the surface of its body, in a spectacular display of multicoloured flashes. But where there is cognition, memory, emotion, where there is a man, the light show sometimes happens on the inside, a fireworks display of the soul's contents, transformed and expressed in a way that the nursing staff will dismiss as hallucination, but which is in fact no less true than the life itself.

In the week leading up to Friday, September 2, 2016, I accompanied my father in his transition to death. I came back and he did not. I am not yet old, and was only there to help him across. But I am not yet fully back. I know things now that I did not know before, about him, about us, about the living and the dead, and about the category of being or of mental phantasm (what is the difference, really?) that the country folk call 'ghosts'.

I always knew I would write about him. Though it may seem too soon, too raw, against protocol, to do so is the closest thing to filial piety I have in me. To do so is to honour him, who long ago vested his own dream of writerliness in me. He set up this very website over a decade ago; his final post to Facebook, in mid-August, was a review of my most recent book in The Nation. The hard drive of his laptop, which I have taken into my possession, is filled with fragments of creative writing projects, not least a folder with hundreds of files (including a home-made cover) contributory to a novel, entitled Bananaman, that would have been about the CIA and the United Fruit Company's involvement in various Central American coups d'état, and about the creation of a certain popular peelable monoculture that my father somehow saw as key to understanding his American century. Bananaman will never see the light of day, but I think that at some point my father stopped expecting it would, and that, after some years of intergenerational competition, he could now just kick back, let me do all the work, and beam with paternal pride. So this is a coda to that, a necessary culmination of who each of us was for the other.

I arrived in Barstow, California, on Friday, August 26, and found him in the emergency room of the Barstow Community Hospital. I live in Paris, and so going to Barstow is supposed to be some kind of joke or supplice, but the truth is I love that isolated desert town, that dusty station of the 'Mormon Corridor'. And this is not some affected European romance for the American West either. Route 66 is not a made-up place of songs and movies. It is the sort of place where my kin live and die.

I arrived there and found him dreaming, grabbing and handling the ridge of his blanket, as I would see him do repeatedly over the next week, talking in his sleep about used cars, odometers, leases, good and bad deals. He had been sent to the hospital from the veterans' home, where he had lived since the early spring, due to his extremely low blood oxygen level. This was a sign of possible clotting, they said, but no clots could be found. So he drifted in and out of sleep, and we chatted. At one point he awoke, and called for a nurse, and asked for a spoon. What did he want the spoon for? For the ice cream. 'What ice cream?' I asked. He looked around, and said that perhaps he was still dreaming. Then the nurse came with the spoon, and he said: 'At least the spoon's real'.

This was the first gust of what would over the next days grow into a fierce storm of impressions of things that were not strictly speaking there. This was not, as I've said, a break with reality, but an intensification of it. We enjoyed talking about the ontological status of his visions. When birds and lizards were swarming around his room, and I asked him whether he really believed they were there, he insisted, 'Well, I do think I am better than most people at noticing things'. He told me that during the night the hospital staff had sent six people into his room, 'dressed as Japanese clocks'. He told me there was one of them out in the hallway right now. I looked at it, and told him I thought it was just a piece of medical equipment. He said, 'I guess you're right'. Later he looked at the light switch near his bed, and declared happily: 'Look, they're showing me 50 years ago in the navy!' I nodded, still uncertain what he meant. Some minutes later he looked at the switch again: 'Now it's you kids when you were little!' 'Do you mean you can see these things in the light switch?' I asked, and he said yes. 'How do you think they're doing that?' 'I gave them my e-mail address when I checked in', he said, 'so they must have gone into my hard drive and pulled out my whole life story'.

I recount these things because they are what we lived through together that week, in the liminal space between life and death, and because they were not, as might be supposed from a distance, horrifying or pathological. They were part of the natural calm and grace that, I learned, can make the state of dying into something truly distinct from both life and death.

But life comes first. Kenneth Von Smith was born on October 2, 1940, in Los Angeles, and grew up east of that city in West Covina. His father, Von Smith, was born into a Mormon community in Sugar, Idaho, and his mother, Bertie Mae Cruce, was born in Monticello, Arkansas. He told me that 'Von' had been a misspelling of 'Vaughan', and that while living in Nice (which he always called 'Nice, France') his middle name was, to his great amusement, often mistaken for a nobiliary particle. I was never close to Grandpa Von, and was always somewhat frightened by him. I recall numerous exclamations one might expect from a reactionary grump, as for example when an ad for the NAACP came on TV, and he muttered, 'How about a National Association for the Advancement of White People?' I would not bring this up right now, were it not for the way it fits with my own story of my father and his death. Ken once told me that Von's very last words to him, as he lay in his Kaiser hospice-care room in Sacramento in 1991, with the TV blaring as usual, were none other than these: 'You know, that Arsenio, he's alright'. Grandpa was perhaps wrong in the particulars, but right in the broader gesture towards racial reconciliation he was, in his own way, attempting.

Much of my father's identity was wrapped up in affirming that Arsenio is indeed alright, where by 'Arsenio' we understand not Mr. Hall of long-forgotten American talk-show fame, of the New Jack moment that will mean nothing to the present generation, but rather all the affable goodhearted men of all races who, like him, just wish to live and be free and trade tall tales and relish small pleasures. My father was white, but he wanted no association that would represent him in this. He belonged to an imagined universal brotherhood, masculine, no doubt, but resolutely cosmopolitan. He often passed blanket judgments to the effect that this or that marginalized minority group consists of 'good people'. He spent time in the South of France and reported that the Maghrebins there are honest, hard working, and friendly; he retired to Mexico and repeated the same stock phrases of praise for the Indios at each conversation. Arsenio, for all possible Arsenios, is alright.

My uncle for his part, my father's younger brother, seems to have drifted off in the other direction, toward the ideology of white supremacy. I have no contact with him, and will not speak of him here. I will not speak of him, except to say that in recent years it has come to seem to me that each of us, in our own way, is a spark from the same flint. We have the same bug of race running through our American blood, back to Grandpa Von and no doubt back before him still, to I can only imagine what sort of eccentric firebrand men named Orville or Cletus with great moustaches, with the preacherman's current running through them and quickening them, who believed and declaimed, variously, that blacks and whites should be sent to live on separate continents, or should be forced to marry and generate a future crop of raceless babes. We have each dealt with this legacy in very different ways, but in truth I take it we are all just articulating, with varying degrees of articulacy, our own versions of the Arsenio confession. To the very end, we chatter about, obsess over, and live and breathe the American matter of race.

It would be difficult to say what my father's last words to me were; in a sense everything he said during that week was 'last'. But one moment stands out in particular that I may as well designate as equivalent to Von's Arsenio confession, though as it happens it had nothing to do with race. Looking at me from his hospital bed, Ken said: "Thanks for coming all this way. It's good to have someone to turn to and to say, 'So long, and thanks for all the fish'." This was, most readers will know, not a hallucination, but an oblique reference to the fourth instalment in Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, which my father had lying about the house circa 1984, and which is one of the first books, nominally for adults, that I read. Other titles around at that time include Peter S. Beagle's I See By My Outfit and Tom Robbins's Still Life with Woodpecker, both of which I left untouched.

The allusion was hardly appropriate, as I'd done nothing remotely comparable, even by loose metaphor, to the bringing of fish. It really just showed how a simple phrase, like 'So long', can become fixed to a shared cultural reference, and how that reference can in turn flicker out, to the shared contemplative joy of the both of us, from the memory embers of his dying. The phrase 'So long', by itself, uttered on Thursday, September 1, showed, for the first and only time that week, that he knew what sort of embers these were, that he understood what was happening.

The rest of the week was spent completing small tasks, as if these held the key to immortality. On Friday evening, August 26, when at the emergency room they could find no clots, he was released to me, to be taken back to his private living unit at the VA home. This was the beginning of a weekend together that still seems like it could not have really happened. He could barely straighten his legs, yet somehow we took a trip to the Barstow Wal-Mart together. I drove right up to the entrance, and left him in the car while I went to find one of those reduced-mobility carts that come in so handy at that establishment ('Maximum One Passenger, or 550 lbs.', read a sign attached to it). He drove it around that Wal-Mart with such purpose! His main objective was to find a 'grabber', that is, an extensible 3-foot-long bar, with a trigger on one end, and a sort of artificial hand on the other. This would be good, he explained, for picking up things around his room. It would solve the problem of his ever-shrinking range of motion. We also bought a box of Special K and a gallon of milk, both of which would go unopened, and we would have bought some cans of Dennison's chile con carne, if they had not run out. At the check-out counter a small girl sitting in the seat of her mother's shopping cart found herself facing my father in his reduced-mobility cart. He made a clownish face, and she began to cry. He shrugged. I could tell what it was she was seeing.

I don't know much about the West Covina years, other than that a neighbour boy's mother used to coerce him into imitating Woody Woodpecker, circa 1953, for her dullard son, and that around the same time Bertie bought him a white leather jacket that was in style and that he very much coveted-- except that she could not afford the real thing, and so bought him a version in imitation leather that he, so as not to hurt her feelings, would put on on his way out the door, only to hide it in a secret spot in the garage each morning before heading to school.

My father joined the navy in, I think, 1959, a move that seems to have been the primary cause of his subsequent class mobility. He was deemed intelligent by the relevant officials with their tests, and he was taught some Russian and a bit more Mandarin Chinese. At the Barstow hospital, with chapped lips and weakened lungs, he continued to attempt to speak Chinese with every employee who might possibly understand it. 'What dialect do you speak?' he asked Doctor Ellen Chao. 'I'm sorry, I don't understand what you're saying', she replied in slightly accented English. 'He's asking you what dialect of Chinese you speak', I interposed. 'Oh', she said, unimpressed. 'Mandarin'. I learned very quickly that nurses and orderlies are much more willing than doctors to indulge an old white man's interest in their cultural backgrounds.

In basic training the drill sergeant once barked: 'You've been wearing the same underwear for a week now, it's time to change. Smith, you change with Jackson; Jackson, you change with Sanchez...' On another occasion, I have it from a reliable source, a fellow enlisted man defecated something that took the shape of a question mark.

After basic Ken did something involving the transcription of Communist Chinese radio transmissions, stationed, I believe, somewhere in the Yellow Sea. Later he was made a journalist, and edited the South China Sea Daily News, a military newspaper. He learned some Tagalog and was sent to the Philippines. He claims to have once been shot at in a bar there by a band of paramilitaries he identified as moros, which, he says, or said, was the name used to refer to jihadists there long before they were in the international news. The Asia-Pacific region was his first opening to the world beyond the Mormon Corridor of the American West (he did not grow up a Mormon, as Von wanted nothing to do with religion, but as a cultural-geographical designation, this term has more salience than most Americans know). After his discharge, in the late-1960s in San Francisco, he would frequent the Beijing-sponsored bookstore and buy pamphlets with titles like The Chinese Writing Reform. He hoped to be the first Western journalist allowed to enter Mao's China.

He was, by vocation, a journalist, and a photojournalist, with work published, by the end of the 1960s, in Time and Newsweek. He interviewed Jimmy Stewart and Hubert Humphrey for the Guam Daily News. But I am getting ahead of myself (and how could one not get ahead of oneself, attempting to recount all the worthwhile tales, told over 44 years, from a life of 75 years?). In the early years of that decade, just out of the navy, Ken returned to California to his parents' home in Lancaster, a town not unlike Barstow in the high desert northeast of L.A. There he became a distant friend of Frank Zappa (1940-1993), and a roommate of Don Van Vliet, otherwise known as Captain Beefheart (1941-2010). Here is how my father relates the story of this friendship (this is from a Word file I found in his hard drive):

I first met Don when we were 15 years old. My family had moved to Lancaster, California and Don lived next door. Neither of us bothered to go to school much and we would spend the day just talking and listening to music. Frank Zappa was a good student and attended class every day, then would often drop by some afternoons.

I joined the Navy at 17. When discharged three years later, I returned to Lancaster. Alex St. Clare and I rented the house across the street from the home of Don’s parents — Granny Annie’s house. Fun times.

Even though neither Don nor I had much formal schooling, we had both independently been reading short stories by Aldous Huxley. A half-century later I still think it is extraordinary that two high school drop-outs with no predictable future would be discussing Huxley’s short story “The Gioconda Smile”.

Mentioning Huxley is reason enough to tell a story — rather, to correct a story.

After finishing my Navy tour, I got a job as a reporter, editor and all-around flunky at the small daily newspaper in Lancaster. One of my tasks was to skim the weekly real estate transactions looking for something, anything, of interest.

One week I noticed that Aldous Huxley had bought a home in the desert, about 20 miles from Lancaster. I mentioned this to Don, who was then selling Electrolux vacuum cleaners door-to-door (he was a very good salesman). Don suggested we drive the following afternoon, a Saturday, to Huxley’s desert home. As good luck would have it, Huxley himself answered the knock on the door.

Don explained that he was a vacuum cleaner salesman, but what prompted our visit is that we both liked his writing. No sale was made, but Huxley was polite and we chatted for a couple of minutes.

So, decades later, Don was on the David Letterman Show and he was asked about the Huxley visit to pitch a vacuum cleaner. “I told him this thing sucks,” Don said to Letterman. Don had a genius manner of embellishing his stories. I was there and I did not hear that being said. Further, I don’t believe that slang sense of the word “suck” existed in the early 60s. But, it is still a good story.

I saw Don fairly often until we were about 30, then less often until our early 40s.

I don't know how much of this is true. I do know that my father was upset when Zappa died, and when Beefheart died, and on both occasions he mentioned how short life is and how you should not go too long without contacting old friends, lest they slip away for good. There is an ingenious TV commercial for Beefheart's 1970 album, Lick My Decals Off, Baby, which is avant-garde in a way that my father certainly was not, but which, in its simple and nonsensical recitation of Southern California toponyms evokes for me Ken's essence and history more fully than any other documentary source ever could.

This story also reveals something important about my father and his friends. He had a ton of them, but they did not so much constitute a stable as a parade. They passed through his life like water, some grew alienated due to debts or slights, perceived or real, some just moved on. Late in life his most enduring friendship, with the writer Joe Bageant, seems to have derived its staying power principally from the fact that Joe himself died in 2011. Ken devoted considerable energy over the past five years to keeping Joe's reputation, as a chronicler of working-class white American life, alive, both editing the 2012 collected-works volume, Waltzing at the Doomsday Ball, and maintaining the website www.joebageant.net. It is hard to say what will happen to Joe's memory now, or why Ken was so committed to preserving it. Judging from the contents of his hard drive, it seems to me that Ken would have liked to do what Joe Bageant did, to have found a voice similar to Joe's, but for reasons I will get to soon enough was prevented from doing so by a concern to avoid antagonism, a desire to get along with everybody, to the extent possible. He preferred, or a big part of him preferred, to work behind the scenes, to cultivate and encourage the voices of others, including not just Joe's, but also my own. In part this had to do with genuine interest in others, in their thriving, but also with a pessimism, emerging over the final third of his life, about the usefulness of political debate.

By the end of the 1960s Ken had taken advantage of the GI Bill and completed an MA in sociology at the University of San Francisco, where he was required to take more than one philosophy course taught by old Jesuits. He was never religious himself, he spoke mockingly if lovingly of his neighbour at the VA home who went to chapel every day. But he also averred to me a number of times that he was impressed by Thomas Aquinas's argument to the effect that there must by a Prime Mover if there is to be any motion at all. Other intellectual reference points included Orwell, Mencken, Darwin's The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Gustave Le Bon's The Crowd. For years he sought to give his copies of these books to me, as an expression of his commitment to 'getting down to just two suitcases'. I never wanted them, and never recognised them as having anything to do with my own personal canon. I also resented any suggestion that my aspiration to the life of a writer had anything to do with him, or that I was in self-imposed exile in France for anything like the same reasons. I was doing things the right way, and not just dabbling. But now I can't, for the life of me, understand what was so important about this distinction.

Photographic evidence shows, as we move out of the 1960s, a transition from a lean, boyish, and clean-cut fellow into a fairly excellent exemplar of the wide-faced, corduroyed, 1970s moustache man. Some pictures show him overacting the part, like the one above, in which he seems to be posing as a bit-part player from All the President's Men. By the middle of that decade the home computers began to show up, with giant suction cups into which he stuck the phone receiver, and dialled up some sort of pre-Internet entity called 'the Source'. There was a Datsun 280zx, and there was an unbroken chain of Vantage cigarettes. There were some cassette tapes in a box: Blood, Sweat, and Tears; Fleetwood Mac; Jim Croce; Charles Wright and the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band. I don't recall anyone ever listening to them, but they had to have got there somehow.

My sister was born in 1970 and I was born two years later. A decade or so after that, a divorce, and my father moves from the defunct chicken farm in Rio Linda that my parents had acquired from my maternal grandparents, into a sleek divorce condo in downtown Sacramento. A Sony CD player arrives, and a few CD's: Flora Purim & Airto; Steely Dan; Pink Floyd's The Final Cut; the Talking Heads' Remain in Light. I listened to the last of these with his headphones on so thoroughly that I no longer need to hear it in order to hear it. Then a girlfriend arrived from the world of Sacramento political fundraiser dinners, a German ex-model, born post-war but with a name that would sooner place her in Grimm's fairy tales, a former Virginia Slims billboard girl from the 'You've Come a Long Way, Baby' era who had taken to running the most painfully '80s, most achingly local and small-time runway fashion events, with her mulleted son up on stage showcasing acid-washed denim to a Frankie Goes to Hollywood soundtrack. Out of this ridiculous world there emerged a ridiculous marriage, which lasted for a while, then ended without a trace.

The marriage did bring about an unexpected career development that would have some rather more lasting consequences. Ken recounts the story as follows (from an un-Googlable website he began to set up as an archive for students and journalists interested in this chapter of American state politics):

In 1986, I had leased a condo in downtown Sacramento. Two days after moving in, I learned that the unit directly above me was the home of Maureen Reagan and her husband Dennis Revell, and the unit next door to me was occupied by the Secret Service. My wife at the time had been a model, had owned a modeling school, and was then operating a casting agency and location scouting service. She and Maureen got along quite well, and the four of us occasionally socialized in Sacramento and in Los Angeles, where Maureen and Dennis had another home.

Both Maureen and Dennis were well aware that my political views were to the left of center on many issues. It was understood, but never discussed, that I did not vote for her father in his races for governor of California or for president of the United States.

One day, Maureen asked me to listen to a draft of a speech calling for the indictment of Oliver North and John Poindexter on charges of treason. I listened and offered some suggestions, but I also cautioned her that she would be hitting a hornet’s nest. She explained that North and Poindexter “had lied to the President” — her father. I asked what the lie was, but she would give no details, saying it would all be public some day. Some 25 years later, I can make a good guess, but it would only be a guess.

At the time, Maureen was talking to Republicans in Arizona about the expanding difficulties with Governor Evan Mecham. Maureen was then co-chair of the Republican National Committee and Dennis was involved in the promotion of Arizona for the Superconducting Super Collider. One day she called from Washington to say that she thought I should consider interviewing for the job of press secretary to Governor Mecham. The Doonesbury cartoons lampooning Mecham had just started running and I had read the news about Mecham’s troubles. I told Maureen that I did not think my politics would fit well in the Mecham administration. She disagreed, saying there needed to be more balance in the Arizona governor’s office...

I believed in supporting the ideal of fair and honest elections. I was greatly bothered by contrived political scandals and the subsequent coverage by sensationalist news media... [U]ntil age 50 I had idealistic, utopian expectations for the democratic process. I realize now that almost any political system, capitalist, socialist, whatever, would work if it were not for corruption and greed. But, expecting to find political bodies and governments free of corruption is foolish.

Now, I know that I can’t control political and diplomatic decisions so I don’t much care about them. I do follow some news about current events, but only to learn what might impact family and friends. However, I do care about history and I believe that attempts should be made to correct the facts.

Ken would later joke about his poor track record with US governors (from the hard drive):

In the past century only four governors have been indicted on felony charges while in office. I worked for three of them and the fourth was my uncle.

Here are the governors:

In 1965, I was an editor and reporter for a newspaper on Guam and one of the owners was Ricardo Bordallo. Ricky was later elected governor of Guam. It’s a sad story, but he was indicted and convicted on various charges, sentenced to federal prison, and committed suicide rather than being incarcerated.

In 1987, I went to work as Arizona Governor Evan Mecham’s press secretary. While in office, he was indicted on felony charges in what I regard as prosecutorial abuse. Mecham was later acquitted on all charges.

In 1989, J. Fife Symington was building a campaign staff in his campaign for governor of Arizona. I was invited to join the staff with the thought that I might pull in some of Mecham’s supporters. On my first day attending a staff meeting, Symington asked a half-dozen or so of us campaign workers if we had heard any negative rumors. I told him that the the local press was talking about Symington being “upside down to Dai-ichi Kangyo (a large Japanese bank) for a quarter billion dollars.” His face grew even redder than normal and he yelled, “You Mechamites are all alike” — and he fired me on the spot. Shortest job tenure I’ve ever had at just two hours. Symington was later convicted of financial fraud and thrown out of office.

The fourth is Lee Cruce, the second governor of Oklahoma. He was my great-grandfather’s half-brother. He was not charged with a crime, but there were threats of indictment and impeachment — mostly because he was married to a Cherokee chief’s daughter and that did not sit well with the power elite. Among other good deeds, Uncle Lee as governor commuted the sentences of all prisoners on death row.

After his term as governor, Lee Cruce continued his career as a lawyer and banker. In 1930, Cruce was defeated in the primary for the United States Senate losing out to Thomas Gore, the maternal grandfather of author Gore Vidal. So, if Uncle Lee had won the election, we would not have had to read and listen to Vidal’s oft-repeated stories of reading proposed legislation to his blind grandfather.

After Mecham's impeachment the annual Christmas ornaments from the White House stopped arriving. Maureen and Dennis grew more difficult of access, and Ken's future prospects in the GOP grew dim. Mecham, a Mormon and a former car salesman, died in a VA home in Phoenix in 2004 with advanced Alzheimer's, looking, I'd imagine, much like many of the old men I saw decorating the home in Barstow. Ken moved back to Sacramento and went into the information-management business, littering CD-ROM's everywhere throughout the early '90s. First he lived in a respectable home in Roseville with his wife and worked for Transamerica, then soon after he lived in a trailer park in North Highlands with his mother and described himself as self-employed. There he sat in front of his computer by the sliding-glass door of the 'mobile', now permanently connected to the Internet, from day to night, for about five years. He started up websites, sold them, and accepted payment in stock options. He specialised in real estate and travel news. He visited dating sites for research, as they were, he explained, the very vanguard of the World Wide Web.

In 2000 I had just taken my first job at some university in the middle of nowhere in Ohio. He declared that he was not going to spend his 60th birthday sitting in a trailer with his mother, and so he set out from California to drive across the country, ostensibly to see his nominal employer at the company headquarters in Connecticut. It was while stopped in Oxford, Ohio, in my apartment, that he received a call from Hartford telling him that his services would no longer be needed. So he hung around for a month, then another month, driving his old BMW around town, listening to Moby on his custom car speakers, and watching Genghis Blues at home over and over again. He loved Paul Pena, the blind American blues singer of Cabo Verdean origin who became a champion Tuvan throat singer. Pena represented an ideal of authenticity and self-creation for him that he sought everywhere and that he was disappointed to find, generally, only in imperfect expressions.

He moved on from there to Little Rock, and found a cousin with a furniture store, where he worked for a while. Then he entered into some sort of business arrangement with an American based in Nice (France), and eventually left to stay in his new boss's apartment there for what turned out to be five years or so. He never really learned French, but was very happy in his 'expat' world. He befriended two young women of Algerian origin, and until the end of his life recounted with pleasure the time they invited him to a family feast, where he met their conservative father, who signalled across linguistic boundaries his approval for this friendship on the grounds that, Ken supposed, he could see my father was an authentic and decent guy just like he was. Many fair-weather friends came and went. A high point was a party at the home of Sally Jessy Raphael.

The business relationship fizzled, Nice grew too expensive, and Ken took off for another expat community in Ajijic, near Lake Chapala in Mexico. Here there was some of the same crowd as in Nice, but also a harder edge: men with eye-patches, scarred Vietnam vets, and the ever-present spectre of drug violence. I visited him there twice, in 2009 and 2011. He complained that it was increasingly hard to find people to talk to, that all the old 'gringos' just sat around and drank until they died. No one was interested in anything important. But what about writing? He would have liked to write about important things, but was unsure of himself. He listened to podcasts from questionable people, the sort who tell you to stock up on gold, who speak ominously of 'The Fed', who don't like at all what's happening in Washington. Behind all of this suspicion there was also a humanism: he was anti-war, he hated the invasion of Iraq, and drone attacks on children.

He wanted to write about politics, but ever since Arizona, and perhaps before, he had had a sense that it is futile to even try, that everyone in the news, or in a position of influence, is a bullshitter, while everyone who speaks the truth is ipso facto on the margins. Gustave Le Bon already understood that crowds are mad, and if you have managed to drum up support for your own view, all you have really done is generated a crowd. ('You seek followers? Seek zeroes!' Nietzsche said.) Best to just stay quiet, and to try to be kind. Mexicans will smile back, if you smile at 'em. Mexican women will ask you to hold their babies for them when they go into the store. Good, honest, authentic Mexico!

In December, 2015, Ken's pain could no longer be written off as a pinched sciatic nerve. His doctor in Ajijic had long ago lost his license to practice in the United States. They were friends, of course, but friends can't detect each other's metastatic prostate cancer. So he came back to the US, to a veterans' hospital in San Bernardino County, not far from where he grew up. They figured out what was wrong, and soon he was moved out to a nursing care home in Redlands, and then to another one in Yucaipa. There was no one to talk to. An old lady drove around in a reduced-mobility cart adorned with plush-toy cats. She wouldn't allow you to greet her until you'd greeted each of the cats individually, and preferably by name.

He applied to move to the VA home in Barstow, where he arrived in April of this year. It was hard to find people to talk to, but that was no reason not to be kind. There was an old guy, again, in a reduced-mobility cart, who had had a stroke, who kept repeating the same two phrases in Tagalog, which, he then went on to explain, without fail, 'is the national language of the Philippines'. There was a man with long white hair who had worked as a Baha'i missionary in Venezuela (to whom I gave the books I had written that were left on Ken's shelf). There was a Trump supporter, whom Ken liked to greet, after which he would say to me with amusement: 'That's the Trump guy'. And there were the kitchen workers, to whom he would say, 'Hola! ¿Cómo estás?' And they would say: 'Your Spanish is so good!' And there was the roadrunner that would dart past the window of his residence unit every now and then, that he once saw swallowing up a lizard before disappearing into the desert. He said he saw it when we were driving back from Wal-Mart, just before sunset on Saturday, August 27, but I do not know if it was really there.

This is a trace of the lingering glow of my father. Incomprehensible, here, is the multitude of things worthy of being related, of things committed to memory, of things invented and recounted as true to those of us who weren't even born yet. Incomprehensible, the vividness of the life-show in the light-switch that played out at the boundary between life and death. Incomprehensible, now, the absence of the once-living, the way his memory lingers as if it were itself a being, as if it were itself alive.

Is philosophy practiced by a “specialized and privileged elite within a broader society”? Does everyone in society do it in some way? If philosophy were more like dance, it would be ubiquitous. But it isn’t a practice that we see in every culture—in fact, Smith asserts, it has only arisen organically as a defined practice twice in human history, once in Greece and once in medieval India. But if philosophy were more like ballet, we should be able to see it as part of something larger than itself.

Smith looks to answer these questions by surveying the role of the philosopher and the meaning of philosophy since ancient times in different cultures and across the world. Because he’s conducting a survey, his modus operandi is to take an expansive and prismatic view of the kinds of work a philosopher can do. While the survey includes practices that define themselves as philosophic, it also explores the philosophical aspects of things like ritual, myth, even astronomy.

The style and method of Smith’s book show him to be as good as his word. The text is divided into six chapters, corresponding with six “types” of philosopher: the Curiosa, the Sage, the Gadfly, the Ascetic, the Mandarin, and the Courtier. These categories are not mutually exclusive; they are more like archetypes or allegories, tools for exploring the changing relationship between philosophy and society. Each chapter flits about from East to West and from ancient times to modern; each teems with quotes, examples, personal anecdotes, and fictional monologues by its philosophical characters, offset as long block quotes. In writing this way, Smith has taken a huge aesthetic gamble—one that he never quite admits to. He writes, flippantly, that “A story needs characters,” making the conceit sound like a gimmick to sell books. He is selling himself short: His book is a laudable effort to straddle the many ways of thinking about philosophy, and to avoid promoting one particular perspective.

But the survey also has an agenda: Smith is vocal, in this book and elsewhere, about the problems that arise with a definition of philosophy that is exclusively Western. While I have no doubts about his appreciation for the philosophy of other cultures (he teaches classical Indian philosophy, for one), the point of his survey is less intellectual (or passionate) than tactical; he wants to convince academic philosophers that it’s a serious inconsistency, if not an actual logical fallacy, to define philosophy narrowly as a Western endeavor or, more constrained still, a Western academic one.

April 7, 2016

After a 2015 filled with near constant polemics on the subject, I had hoped to retire from discussing Charlie Hebdo, at least in English. But on Sunday the French magazine posted on its website an evidently non-satirical editorial, in English, seeming to make explicit the Islamophobic convictions that had motivated the cartoons that provoked the murder of its principal contributors on January 7, 2015. The anti-Charlie forces in Anglophone social media immediately crowed that they had told us so, that this was just the latest proof of what we should have seen all along.

The editorial is feeble. It runs together three stock figures of the Muslim minority in France, and treats them all as symptoms of one and the same social problem. These are, to wit, the nominally Muslim teenagers who are radicalised and coaxed into blowing themselves up; the pious Muslim man who seeks to integrate into French society economically while remaining, in his soul and on his knees, oriented toward Mecca; and, finally, the subjugated Muslim woman forced by her patriarchal community to wear a veil.

Each of these figures, obviously, deserves independent consideration, and it is only the crudest straw-man fantasy about some monolithic Islam that would run them together.

The teenagers, for one thing, probably could have been drawn into a different sort of death cult that told them a different sort of fairy tale, if they had been born in a different time and place. The anxiety about losing the freedom to select pork products at the local sandwicherie, in turn, is an expression of a distinctly French parochialism, and one that in many of its expressions is positively adored by the Anglo-American left. All our effusion over the French perfection of the good life through slow and artisanal food, through rejection of GMOs, fails to grasp that the value placed on these things in French culture is the expression of a world-view that is always a hair’s breadth away from chauvinism. It says: our way of life is the best in the world, it grows right up out of the soil; don’t tread on us. It is only when this traditionalism bumps up against the traditionalism of halal dietary customs that it makes us uncomfortable.

I have no patience for either of these. The ethnic cuisine of my people comes pre-packaged and microwave-ready, and I find this freedom from concerns about terroir and authenticity in my eating habits well-suited to my cosmopolitan politics. I do think ham should be outlawed in France and everywhere else, but out of respect for the creature it comes from, not fear of it. The fact that the never-ending hecatomb of meat production can come up as a tangential issue in the course of discussing another, supposedly more serious issue might serve as a reminder of how much of our political life is really just a matter of picking and choosing.

But I don’t really want to discuss the argument of the editorial itself. I want to try to make sense, one more time, of the cultural role of Charlie Hebdo, and of what the Anglo commentariat might be missing about it. A first point, one that should be obvious, is that most of the luminaries among the magazine’s contributors are dead now, so we can't really talk about a continuity of identity between the operation to which the assassinations were a response, and what Charlie Hebdo is coming up with now. This editorial seems to reflect most of all the spirit of Charb (Stéphane Charbonnier), rather than the other victims of January 7. Charb was in his forties, and was not one of the senior cohort, such as Cabu and Wolinski, whose outlook was forged in the 1960s and whose principal preoccupation seems to have been the corruption of the French power elite, the cravenness of the Catholic church, the horrible spectre of the rise of the National Front.

Charb was significantly less committed to satire as a mode of engagement with the world than the others, and wanted to offer straightforward arguments, often about what he saw as the threats arising from mass Muslim migration to Europe. Quite apart from any consideration of his politics, Charb’s approach was never what Charlie Hebdo did best. As a cartoon by Luz of September 2015 didactically explains, satire is not only a way of making critical points about society or politics, as one might do in an Op-Ed piece; it is its own discursive mode, in which different rules and different standards of evaluation apply. I think Charlie Hebdo is at its best when it remains in this mode.

A second point has to do with the role of laïcité in French society. I was struck recently watching the Soviet silent-film director Dziga Vertov's 1934 Three Songs for Leninfor what it reveals about the longer history of 'the question of the veil'. The first 'song' features, just a few minutes in, the bold intertitle, 'My face was in a dark prison', followed by a sequence of images meant to show that the arrival of Marxist-Leninism would free the people of Muslim Central Asia from their backward and superstitious ways. Now you might suppose that this is just a strong-armed Stalin-era perversion of the nominal ideology of the Soviet Union, but in fact we find substantially the same view in Marx himself, as in an 1851 newspaper article in which he argues that the introduction of industrial weaving by the British in Bengal is the best thing that ever happened there, as it broke up the traditional village economies that were also the foundation of patriarchal despotism.

This presumption remains a real factor in much of the thinking of the Arab and European left on questions of culture and the limits of toleration. Something close to it is what guides Hafid Melhay, the owner of Libre Ère, the finest bookstore in Ménilmontant. Hafid is originally from Tunisia, and his shop specializes in Palestinian poetry, histories of the 20th-century non-aligned movement, scripts for plays like Kwame N'goran's Rosa Luxemburg. His humble shop, dare I say, has rather more useful resources for making sense of the present situation than the Librairie Essalam a few doors down from it on the Boulevard de Belleville, an Islamic bookstore featuring in its window French translations of the infamous Harun Yahya's screed against the theory of evolution, and some self-help manuals with tips on how to become happier through a deepening of piety. Back at Libre Ère, Hafid volunteers his services as a scribe and translator for recent immigrants from the Arabic-speaking world, and keeps posted in the store's entryway, inserted among so many classic works of socialist theory, of Arab and African nationalism, of postcolonial criticism, a classic Charlie Hebdo cover. If you're a North African socialist in Ménilmontant this combination of cultural products makes quite a bit more sense than if you are an American social-media activist desperate, above all, to be seen as taking the right side on the issue of the day, which means above all refusing to acknowledge that some questions have complicated histories and there might be no right side to take.

One of the things organised religions excel at is the control and subordination of women. This is, as American academics like to say, 'problematic', and in a way that we are all perfectly prepared to acknowledge when it comes, for example, to the restriction of abortion rights in the United States by the Christian right. Addressing this problem, when it is manifested in minority communities such as the Muslim population of France, can exacerbate their persecution and strengthen the hand of reactionary forces like the party of Marine Le Pen. But the distastefulness of this consequence does not make religious patriarchalism go away. As far as I can tell, the claim of most of the contributors to Charlie Hebdo, to be defenders of secularism who do not have a particular hostility to Islam, is, by their own lights, sincere. This sincerity may involve a failure to recognise the ways in which they are abetting the far right in France, but it may also be rooted in a sharper attunement to the concerns and challenges of people such as those who frequent Libre Ère. They are keeping alive a real, significant strand of the genetic legacy of the left, one which can only be cut out with significant reconceptualisation of what the left's core desiderata are.

Social-media activists of the Anglophone soi-disant left have discarded the element of their political legacy that equated progress and liberation with the throwing off of the shackles of tradition, and have adopted as an article of faith the view that each community has its own internal standards by which alone it can be judged. Many of my acquaintances on the Anglophone left like to pretend to be neo-Bolsheviks, and often display that striking propaganda poster from the golden age of Soviet graphic design that says "A woman is also a person." But they are picking and choosing too. The refusal to acknowledge as oppressive anything that is done in the name of Islam is in real contradiction with certain other commitments they have, such as economic parity and full legal equality between men and women. Acknowledging this contradiction is not in itself a failure, and it need in no way be an incitement to persecution of marginalised minority groups. The only real failure is pretending things are simpler than they are. To do so is certainly much more likely to abet those politicians, such as Le Pen or Trump, whose success relies on simplistic formulae. And it is also to betray those countless millions of people from the Muslim world who are themselves wary of the claims of tradition, and of the forms of oppression that are so often excused in its name.

I do not believe the state has any business banning articles of clothing. This flows from a more general commitment to the principle that the state has no business intervening in cultural matters at all, whether culture is conceptualised in terms of 'religion' or not. For one thing, to allow the state to do this sort of thing sets government officials up as ethnographers, art critics, and other sub-species of hermeneuticist. I can't help but notice when in the Balkans that there are many Christian women with their heads covered as well. This is supposed to be an expression of 'culture', and not religion, but in the end, if pressed for explanation, somewhere down the line God is going to come up as the ground and rationale of the prohibition on exposed hair. Yet no Bulgarian grandmother would be told by any conceivable future French state that she must remove her head scarf in order to visit this secular country. I don't know what counts as religion, in other words, and I am a relatively subtle interpreter of culture, so I don't really see how a state bureaucracy could know.

Patriarchy can be perpetuated through women's headgear, in the Christian Balkans as in Muslim Anatolia or the Maghreb, even if not all women's religious attire is experienced by its wearers as oppressive. There is a real danger, if the state sets itself up to fight patriarchy by intervening in matters of attire, that this will only in fact create a further pressure, a new possibility for oppression, of the most marginalised and least powerful members of society. So we are left with a true dilemma.

I prefer to take the horn of it, as of many dilemmas in politics, that minimises state encroachment on individual freedom, as well as on the self-determination of sub-state communities. But in this I see myself as decisively breaking with anything that deserves to be called 'the left', in favour of something much closer to anarchism. Yet I am inclined to see the position of CharlieHebdo, with which I disagree,as representing, again, a sincere and legitimate stance on a real social problem. This is the stance of the traditional left, and it cannot be reduced to simple Islamophobia, any more than Marx's argument for the assimilation of Jews into German society, and thus willy-nilly the eradication of Judaism, can be conflated with Hitlerism. Of course these are different stances. The new, social-media-based Anglophone left, to the extent that it dismisses French secularism as xenophobia tout court, is simply neglecting a significant part of its own legacy, and is misunderstanding much of what is at stake in the current French debate.

March 17, 2016

I have an essay in the most recent Chronicle of Higher Education, which, though it is not presented as such, is a sort of essay-review of two books that have recently been very important to me: James Turner's Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities, and Sheldon Pollock, Benjamin A. Elman, and Ku-ming Kevin Chang (eds.), World Philology. The 'essay-review' genre is ill-defined, but I take it that it involves some explicit account of the main contributions of one or more books, but then launches off from this account to develop some independent but related interests of one's own. The article in the Chronicle is behind a paywall unfortunately, but I will post an excerpt of it here:

...As a historical fact, textual science does indeed often emerge out of a commitment to the divine inspiration of scripture. But it will complicate the common prejudice, which equates secularization and scientific progress, to note that in many cases this commitment in no way blocked the development of philological science. A fascinating case in point is the early history of Arabic philology. As Beatrice Gruendler explains, the newness of Arabic as a literary language at the time of the composition of the Qur'an forced its early interpreters to go and look for aid in understanding its subtle meanings among the archaic poets, and even among the practitioners of oral poetic traditions. She relates that early Muslim scholars, "[w]orking on a poetic heritage that preceded them by up to two centuries and was created in a Bedouin oral culture, ... pursued not only preservation and comparative analysis, but also authentication." They collected poetry from Bedouin informants and compiled lexica on the basis of this fieldwork. Gruendler writes that they also "showed a surprisingly modern interest in dialectal variants, which they likewise recorded in their books." As she notes, these philologists would have been perplexed by the dichotomy over which Nietzsche and Willamowitz-Moellendorff would later fight, between the conception of philology as the study of "a text as an artifact of the past," on the one hand, and on the other philology as the task of bringing a text alive in the present. "For all their veneration of the textual witnesses they gathered, their sharp-eyed testing of their authenticity, and their linguistic commentary on them, the Arabic philologists were devoted to extracting from these sources a usable language for the present."

The field research of the Arab linguists anticipates the proposals made by the German polymath G. W. Leibniz several hundred years later, at the end of the 17th century, for a sort of 'glottoprospecting' across the Russian Empire, a systematic collecting of samples of the Lord's Prayer in all the native languages of that vast geographical space. For Leibniz however, the interest was in linguistic diversity itself, rather than the richness of a single language. In general in the modern period we see two large shifts occurring in the study of language and its textual traces, both reflected in Leibniz's proposals for linguistic fieldwork. One is a move towards naturalism and an increasing assimilation of the task of linguistic research to other areas of natural science that are concerned with diversity, with botanical taxonomy the most important among these. Thus William Jones's research on the names of plant species in Sanskrit and other South Asian languages, carried out in the 1780s and 1790s, is at once an inquiry into the diversity of the names of things, and of the things themselves.

The second great shift in the modern period was from a scriptural hermeneutics that served to buttress and sustain religious faith, as had been the case in early Islam, to one that, whether or not this was the explicit intention of the hermeneuticists, had as its ultimate effect the historicization and relativization of revealed truths. Julius Caesar Scaliger argued in the 16th century, as Turner notes, that "[t]heological disputes all stem from ignorance of grammar." But increasingly the study of grammar, and of textual science in general, was serving not to secure particular doctrinal claims, but rather to call into question the exceptional authority among texts of the ones that lie at the heart of religious traditions. Perhaps no modern thinker represents this shift more vividly than Baruch Spinoza, whose Tractatus theologico-politicus of 1670 aimed, as Turner argues, "to undercut ecclesiastical authority in civil affairs. A good way to do this was to weaken its ultimate ground in a divinely inspired Bible. Spinoza combined metaphysical naturalism with Hebrew learning to turn the Bible into a product of human history."

What Turner perhaps does not emphasize enough is that the metaphysical naturalism ascending in Spinoza's era is precisely the basis of what would come to be called 'natural science'. For Spinoza, then, as for many others in the next few centuries, the study of nature and the study of texts were united in a single project: that of understanding how things, in the most general sense, came to be the way they are. Sometimes, the parallel and complementary nature of the two varieties of inquiry has been reflected in the pairing of 'natural' and 'civil' history, though often, particularly in the case of natural history, what has been included in this endeavor has not so much to do with reconstructing and accounting for past processes, as with enumerating individual instances of a given phenomena (for Leibniz, for example, natural history is the science of 'singular things'). But whether these terms are evoked or not, throughout the 18th and into the 19th century, the task of learning about how nature got to be the way it is, by decoding the traces of past processes in nature's current form, was seen as fundamentally the same project as accounting for the human past by the study of a particular subset of traces, the written ones, that have been passed down to the present.

Typically, today, we see humanists attempting to get in on the action of the natural scientists down the hall, which is to say to mount the gravy train of grant-seeking that favors work purporting to be of some scientific relevance. Thus marginal Husserlians will attempt to show that phenomenology is relevant to the latest research in neuroscience, and scholars who work on the Scientific Revolution will plead that their own research is relevant for understanding the latest developments in the biotech sector. It is all a bluff, of course, a strategy of keeping two books in which we tell the money-givers one thing, while believing something entirely different about why what matters to us is important. The sad irony of this arrangement is that until not too long ago the cachet flowed in precisely the opposite direction: the natural scientists went to considerable lengths to show that what they were doing was continuous with the interests of the people we would think of today as the humanists.

A full explanation of how this reversal occurred has something to do with the loss of the idea of history as a broad category that straddles the subsequent two-cultures divide. Consider for example the French naturalist Georges Cuvier, writing in 1798 on the occasion of the discovery of some woolly mammoth remains in the Paris region: "Henceforth it will be necessary to add, to the history of the animals that exist at present in each country, that of animals that have lived or been transported there in the past." Here, by 'history', Cuvier has in mind, as Leibniz had before him, simply the enumeration of singular things. But he adds that this endeavor must also include 'history' in our sense, the reconstruction of the past:

For... it will be necessary for naturalists to do for the history of nature what antiquarians do for the history of the techniques and customs of peoples; the former will have to go and search among the ruins of the globe for the remains of organisms that lived at its surface, just as the latter dig in the ruins of cities in order to unearth the monuments of the taste, the genius, and the customs of the men who lived there. These antiquities of nature, if they may be so termed, will provide the physical history of the globe with monuments as useful and reliable as ordinary antiquities provide for the political and moral history of nations.

Not so many years later, the English naturalist Charles Lyell will argue at length that the most suitable disciplinary comparison for geology is, again, history, by which “we obtain a more profound insight into human nature, by instituting a comparison between the present and former states of society.” But, he continues, "far more astonishing and unexpected are the connections brought to light, when we carry back our researches into the history of nature. The form of a coast, the configuration of the interior of a country, the existence and extent of lakes, valleys, and mountains, can often be traced to the former prevalence of earthquakes and volcanoes in regions which have long been undisturbed."

Lyell, in effect, is promoting a science of reading the Earth. We should, perhaps, not exaggerate the radicality of the famous decline of the Renaissance preoccupation with the 'book of nature'. It is true that after the 16th century few people continued to believe that there are literally meanings encoded in the natural world, by a divine author, which we must learn to decipher. But this does not mean that science in its modern incarnation has been engaged in something that is entirely different from reading. As Lyell still understood well into the 19th century, what researchers in at least some central domains of natural science do is not completely separate from what human scientists do: both are interested in coming to understand the present from traces left, intentionally or unintentionally, by authors, or indeed by blind natural processes, in the past.

In light of these precedents, my humble proposal for the restructuring of the disciplines, and moreover for solving the two-cultures problem, is this: there will be a single, unified, scientific discipline dedicated to accounting for the present state of the world through reconstructing the past by whatever means available to us: texts, stone tools, burial mounds, tree rings, sediment deposits, fossils, cosmic background radiation. This discipline can be housed institutionally in what will be called the 'faculty of history', and mechanisms can be put in place to ensure that the textual scholars do not retreat into their own little world, as if the sort of traces they happen to study had nothing to do with the other sorts. There can in turn be a 'faculty of the atemporal sciences', in which researchers work on mathematical proofs, debate the finer points of epistemic modals, and search out the very most general laws describing those things that do not change. Here too mechanisms should be put in place to prevent ghettoization, and, in addition, compulsory instruction in the history of these activities will ensure that no one ever forgets that in the end there are no truly atemporal sciences, but all emerge from peculiar and contingent historical legacies. There can, finally, if desired, be a 'faculty of new stuff', where researchers develop new lightweight materials and better passwords and robots that journey through our entrails, and try to imagine what is to come next in entertainment, lifestyle, and so on. Here, too, training in how things got to be this way should be compulsory, as the only truly reliable guide to how things are going to be from here.

History, I mean, should be elevated to its rightful place, as the reigning science in the emerging universities of the 21st century. It is the best hope for an exit from the current dérive of the humanities, and, much more than this, it is the best hope for overcoming the false and arbitrary rift between the human and the natural sciences. History is considerably larger than philology, yet philology itself may be much larger than it is now perceived to be. Pollock notes that philology "has been everywhere that texts have been, indeed, in a way that we have yet to fully grasp, everywhere that language has been." This ubiquity was however grasped, for example, by the early Islamic field linguists who went out to build their lexica from the oral poetry of the Bedouins. Nor, at other times in history, as for Leibniz and William Jones, was the boundary of the genealogist's project set at the limits of language, but indeed extended to all the things named in language, to the world itself. In their diminished self-understanding, today's humanists have relinquished all these things to the natural scientists, who for the most part do not know what to make of them. By rediscovering its unity with philology in the shared project of history, natural science stands to gain as much as the humanities do: to rediscover its lofty purpose of enabling us to make sense of the world, and of our place in it.

May 20, 2015

I've just completed the first lesson of L. N. Kharitonov's Self-Teaching Manual of the Yakut Language (Third Edition, Moscow, 1987). What satisfaction! At this early stage the vocabulary is very similar to Turkish, though to be precise the true relation is the reverse: modern Turkish is a distant descendant of a Central Asian proto-Turkic, and of all Turkic languages it is Siberian Yakut, or Sakha, that preserves the most archaic features.

My eventual hope is to be able to do an English translation of the oral epic known as the Olonkho, or at least of the parts that have been written down. What I've previously been able to read is Platon Alekseevich Oyunsky's (1893-1939) Russian translation of the saga of Nurgun Bootur the Swift (Yakutsk, 1931), as well as a number of his scholarly works on Yakut poetics. Oyunsky also wrote some of the most heavy-handed, schlockiest Soviet socialist poetry I've ever read (and I've read a lot), but even this didn't do the trick: in 1939 he was removed from a train returning from Moscow to Yakutsk, and arrested for his involvement in 'Yakut bourgeois counterrevolutionary organizations'. He died in a labor camp that same year, and was rehabilitated, for what that's worth, in 1955.

Oyunsky's translations of portions of the Olonkho into Russian are stunning, and to the extent possible evoke the full richness and vitality of the lived --which is to say recited, or quasi-sung-- poem. Is his work, now, 'obscure'? Is it 'obscure' to take an interest in this material? It seems so, especially in our hyperprofessionalized academic landscape where the slightest deviation from our 'area of specialization' is taken as a sign of deviance. But what is important about Yakut epic is that it offers a plain and revealing case study for coming to understand the oral roots of literature. The Olonkho is as literary as Homeric epic, but the history of Siberia's encounter with the technology of writing is different from that experienced in the Eastern Mediterranean. (Plato and Aristotle both cite Homer as an authority, largely thanks to his work having been written down, and the tradition to which I am supposed to belong, philosophy, is often thought to be a tradition of commentary on these two, so I hope it's clear where I'm going with this: philosophy = Olonkho + writing.)

If you do not read Cyrillic, this might look, more or less, like Russian, but it is nothing of the sort. Even the borrowed terms in Sakha are adapted to the radically different phonetics of Turkic. For one thing, as in Spanish, consonant clusters must be flanked by vowels on each end, thus скамейка ('bench'), becomes ыскамыайка, and flaunts right at the outset the dreaded ы, which can strictly never be an initial vowel in Russian, and which the rabid nationalist politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky recently called for eradicating from the Russian language altogether: it is an ugly 'Asiatic' letter representing an ugly Asiatic sound, he said; evidently anxious about the clarity of the distinction, he insisted it was for nomadic pagan hordes, not for Russians.

I have tremendous admiration for Soviet foreign-language pedagogy, and am consistently impressed with instruction manuals published in the USSR for the minority languages of the union, even if this means that the Yakut I will be learning, at least for now, will center principally on daily life at the factory, or some dull athletic competition of young Pioneers. Curiously, in Kharitonov's historical introduction he bemoans the Tsarist-era Russification of Yakutia, yet the themes and names he chooses for his exercises are decidedly Russian (and not just Soviet) as well. Here's my translation exercise from the first lesson:

This is a class. Here is a table, a chair, a bench. There stands a stove. This is a door. Here sits Sergei. There sits Semyon. Over there stands Ivan. Ivan, come, sit here. Mikhail, come, stand here. What is this? This is a class. What is this here? This is a table, a chair, a bench. What is standing there? There stands a stove. What is over there? Over there is a window. Where is the door? That is the door. Who is sitting here? Sergei is sitting here. Where is Liza sitting? Liza is sitting there. Is Ivan sitting? No, Ivan is standing. Who is standing over there? Ivan is standing over there. Is Piotr here. No, Piotr is not here.

Even with this rudimentary material, the story-seeking human mind fills in the scene, imagines it all. I am reminded here of Nabokov's recollection of his first encounters with English instructional books:

My first English friends were four simple souls in my grammar --Ben, Dan, Sam and Ned. There used to be a great deal of fuss about their identities and whereabouts -- 'Who is Ben?' 'He is Dan', 'Sam is in bed', and so on. Although it all remained rather stiff and patchy (the compiler was handicapped by having to employ --for the initial lessons, at least-- words of not more than three letters), my imagination somehow managed to obtain the necessary data. Wan-faced, big-limbed, silent nitwits, proud in the possession of certain tools ('Ben has an axe'), they now drift with a slow-motioned slouch across the remotest backdrop of memory; and, akin to the mad alphabet of an optician's chart, the grammar-book lettering looms again before me.

And why is Ivan standing? I now find myself wondering. And where is Piotr? (Is he a delinquent? A counterrevolutionary?) And how inviting and hearthy, to find a stove in the classroom. Is this Yakutia? I want to be there.

Over and over again, literature is born, from stories, from suggestions, from traces. The supposed archaicness of many of these traces is no impediment; even in the most hyperrealist novels of the modern age, it has been the mind of the reader doing most of the work, filling it all in.

Much of this filling-in was once done by the bard, by the reciter of literature. But a shift occurred, in much of the world anyhow, after which, it was thought, literature is not to be recited at all, but read. And now all we readers have are traces. Increasingly it seems worthwhile to me to study and to reflect upon the relationship between living literature, of the sort the Olonkho represents, and the fossil vestiges we have now come to take, almost without reflection, for the real thing.

May 14, 2015

My application to join PEN American Center as a 'professional member' was approved. I had been worried they might reject it, since I remain, at least with respect to who pays my salary and what my daily responsibilities looks like, an academic philosopher, but I basically told them that professional philosophers have no conception of a shared avocation that binds them together with their homologues in Azerbaijan and Rwanda, and that for that reason, more than any other, I'm looking to change crowds.

Here is what I wrote, in part:

"Over the past few years I have been drifting gradually away from my academic community (I am a professional philosopher), towards the community of people who define themselves as writers. The reasons for this shift are various, but I will focus on one. Philosophers are in the end extremely provincial, belonging to national traditions with little sense of the existence of a global community of kindred souls. The further one ventures from the Anglo-American and Western European world, the harder it is for professional philosophers to recognize a shared vocation with the people they encounter. Writers by contrast are sharply aware of the global scope of their work, and are capable of sincere solidarity with one another that transcends state and tradition.

"I have on occasion signed petitions, initiated or supported by PEN, in support of persecuted writers and journalists throughout the world. It has recently come to seem to me that my support of such causes might be more useful if I were not simply speaking as a lone voice, but as a member of an organization committed to them. I'll admit that the recent debates about Charlie Hebdo among American writers, in which I participated from my perch in France, helped to bring into clear relief for me how important global solidarity is and why it is best, for me, to pursue this as a writer (rather than as, say, an academic or an activist). But the Charlie Hebdo affair was a crisis in the proper sense: it did not really bring about anything new, but only made plain the cleavages that were already there, both among American writers, and between me and my supposed community of academics who, by contrast with the majority of members of the American chapter of PEN, could not even begin to grasp how important it is to stand against the persecution of satirists everywhere. I take it that this is because they do not understand how important satire is. I expect writers to be somewhat more advanced in this regard."

Earlier, in October of last year, long before I had considered joining PEN, I wrote to a friend:

"Increasingly I have trouble thinking of myself as part of the community of American philosophers, and not only because I live and work in Europe, but also because its members seem fundamentally incapable of understanding what it is to be a philosopher as something more than being able to rattle off the same list of American (and sometimes British, Canadian, and Australian) names, departments, and annual events, or being able to formulate an opinion on Brian Leiter. How different American philosophers are, in this regard, from writers or artists, or, in a somewhat different way, natural scientists, who are all ready and eager to recognize an Albanian or Iranian, say, as one of their own, so long as that person is a self-identified practitioner of the same ancient craft!

"Why is there no philosophical equivalent of PEN? Why are the annual APA meetings treated as being of such tremendous cosmic significance, while the various modest attempts at global philosophical encounter, such as the World Philosophical Congress, are scoffed at by American philosophers as if they were John Bolton at the United Nations? In the end it's because the people who attend the World Philosophical Congress wear cheap suits and have big moustaches and seem, by American parochial standards, to be generally out of it. But again, in the case of, say, literature or art, there is an underlying shared something that the American and the Albanian practitioners of the ancient craft love, and that they recognize as shared. This shared something takes them beyond the differences of costume and idiom. Is there a comparable something that American philosophers love? I'm beginning to have my doubts."

I am still reeling from the time I wrote a piece for the New York Times 'Stone' series about the need to pay attention to the ethical and metaphysical commitments of, e.g., hunter-gatherers or subsistence farmers throughout the world, if we are truly committed to increasing the diversity of, and promoting inclusiveness within, academic philosophy. The response? I was accused on the Feminist Philosophers blog of 'mansplaining'. Elsewhere, many supposed that I had attempted a sort of reductio ad absurdum of the very idea of inclusiveness: for them, it was self-evident that people from different demographic sectors of one and the same society must be included in the project of philosophy, but the idea that people from different societies should be included too struck them as no less self-evidently absurd. This, for me, more than any other, was the moment I thought to myself: Never mind. I'm done here.

I'm not leaving philosophy, but I am leaving behind, to the extent possible, the professional organizations and networks that do not permit me to live out my philosophical commitment to cosmopolitanism. It seems to me, from what I have been able to discern so far, that for complicated historical reasons it is 'writers', and not 'philosophers', who have better cherished and preserved this ideal.

May 11, 2015

Nabokov said its humor did not age well, and unlike Moby-Dick, which is occasionally dismissed as a school-boy's adventure story but never as hokey or stale, The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote de la Mancha seems to suffer under the weight of its most representative scenes. The association of the whole with these mere parts is either too vivid, or it is not vivid at all, as in the case of the subnovel of Anselmo and Lothario, which everyone today knows, without knowing where it is from. Most of these scenes are played out in Part I, by the end of which the presumed hero has survived several battles against hallucinated enemies, drawn his squire hesitantly but hopefully into all of them, and mingled with several different minor characters, many of whose own stories, and not just Lothario's, amount to novels within the novel. He has been tricked into a cage by a sympathetic pair, a canon and a priest, and taken back to his home, to his housekeeper and his niece, in the hope that he might be cured of his madness.

Part I was published first in Madrid in 1605, and over the next ten years would be published in Brussels (1607), Milan (1610), and, in the first of many English translations, in London in 1612. Part II would be published ten years after Part One, also in Madrid, in 1615. Although Don Quixote is so often reduced to the battle with the windmills, which has been concluded within the first few chapters of Part One (leading us to suspect that its iconic character has at least something to do with the fact that many readers get no further), it is Part II, and what happens or is imagined to have happened between 1610 and 1615, that is the true clavis to understanding the novel in its entirety, and in all its philosophical, subversive, deceitful greatness.

So, at the beginning of Part II, Don Quixote is lying in bed, and the priest and the canon come to see how he is doing, to check whether he has recovered from his madness, or whether he continues to take himself for a knight errant. Sancho Panza is there as well, still believing, or willing to believe, that his master is a knight errant, and that great things await them once they set back out on the road. To the solicitous pair's disappointment, the Don continues to maintain that what had looked like madness was in fact the result of supernatural enchantment, a common occurrence in the tales of knights errant, so that, in his case, giants only looked like windmills, a helmet only looked like a washbasin, and so on. But bedside conversation turns to a stranger form of enchantment still: someone, perhaps some quasi-divine being, has, it turns out, produced a written account of everything that happened while Don Quixote was out practicing his knight-errantry, and has published it, first in Madrid in 1605, and later in Valencia, Milan, Antwerp...

The men have arranged for a visit from a recently graduated student, the Bachelor Sansón Carrasco, who has himself read the novel, and may know something of how it came about. Thus in Chapter 3 of Part II (in Edith Grossman's elegant new translation):

Don Quixote was extremely thoughtful as he awaited Bachelor Carrasco, from whom he hoped to hear the news about himself that had been put into a book, as sancho had said, though he could not persuade himself that such a history existed, for the blood of the enemies he had slain was not yet dry on the blade of his sword and his chivalric exploits were already in print. Even so, he imagined that some wise man, either a friend or an enemy, by the arts of enchantment had printed them: if a friend, in order to elevate them and raise them above the most famous deeds of any knight errant; if an enemy, to annihilate them and place them lower than the basest acts ever attributed to the basest squire, although --he said to himself-- the acts of squires were never written down; if such a history did exist, because it was about a knight errant it would necessarily be grandiloquent, noble distinguished and true. This gave him some consolation, but it made him disconsolate to think that its author was a Moor, as suggested by the name Cide, and one could not expect truth from the Moors, because all of them are tricksters, liars, and swindlers [embelecadores, falsarios y quimeristas].

There is no explanation, yet, of why the Moor, in addition to being in his nature a deceiver, should have such a remarkable supernatural ability to know the stories of individual people in the real world, and to transpose them from there into the world of a novel. But Sansón, perhaps, gives us a small hit when he proceeds to make a few basic distinctions between forms of writing:

[I]t is one thing to write as a poet and another to write as a historian: the poet can recount or sing about things not as they were, but as they should have been, and the historian must write about them not as they should have been, but as they were, without adding or subtracting anything from the truth.

The student does not reveal his source, but he is plainly relating from memory what he has learned studying the philosophy of Aristotle at university. The Greek philosopher writes in Book I of the Poetics:

The poet and the historian differ not by writing in verse or in prose. The work of Herodotus might be put into verse, and it would still be a species of history, with meter no less than without it. The true difference is that one relates what has happened, the other what may happen. Poetry, therefore, is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular.

To which genre of writing is Don Quixote supposed to belong, now? The answer seems inseparable from the question of the work's authorship, and of its actual subject. The possibility is briefly considered, more than once, that Sancho Panza is the real hero of the novel, a possibility that is of course mocked and dismissed by Don Quixote himself, who claims that it would violate the most basic rules governing the knights-errant literature to place the squire at the center of the tale, rather than to have him subordinate to his knight. But there is of course very little in the novel that does respect these rules, and in this respect the suggestion and the refutation go together as a sort of affirmation.

This affirmation would be echoed in at least one significant interoperation of the novel. In "The Truth about Sancho Panza," a parable written in 1917 and published first in 1931, Franz Kafka hypothesizes that the squire is the true subject of the novel, and that the 'knight' is in turn a projection of his own lapse into the factitious world of fiction: "Without making any boast of it," Kafka writes,

Sancho Panza succeeded in the course of years, by devouring a great number of romances of chivalry and adventure in the evening and night hours, in so diverting from him his demon, whom he later called Don Quixote, that his demon thereupon set out in perfect freedom on the maddest exploits, which, however, for the lack of a preordained object, which should have been Sancho Panza himself, harmed nobody. A free man, Sancho Panza philosophically followed Don Quixote on his crusades, perhaps out of a sense of responsibility, and had of them a great and edifying entertainment to the end of his days.

Kafka wishes to 'disenchant' Don Quixote by making its protagonist a simple-minded yet curable man, sucked in by fantasy but not misled by it. The world that Sancho Panza returns to, by the end of Kafka's parable, is our world. This is thus not so far from Milan Kundera's reading of Don Quixote: that it is the great milestone of the beginning of 'modernity'. What could be more modern than disenchantment? If you see things shifting shapes, it is not that the world is enchanted, but that you are mad: the death of nature and the birth of the clinic at once.

Yet we might place the squire at the center of the action for reasons that Kafka does not seem to have detected. Who, after all, would violate the conventions to which Don Quixote himself is so faithful? A deceitful Moor, perhaps. And why? Because he is not interested in our world, but in spinning out spurious and false (or, to stick with neutral language, 'non-actual') ones. And why? Because he is a poet and not a historian. And why? Because, as Aristotle taught and as the Moors both learned and eventually passed on to the Christian universities of Iberia, it is this use of the narrative art that is closest to philosophy: to the investigation of the problems of metaphysics that the novel, properly conceived, invites us to consider. This is a fraught and morally treacherous investigation -- it invites us to entertain the false as true (or, again, to put it in neutral terms, to consider the non-actual as actual).

For Don Quixote, who is perhaps the truly simple-minded character in the novel, knights-errant novels express the 'truth' in the sense of 'moral truth': they offer up a proper image of the way things should be. But for someone involved in the production of the Don's tale, perhaps the Cide, offering up moral fables as truth is the greatest falsehood of all, and accordingly the proper response is to subvert the genre, via satire, and with an aim that is eminently philosophical: to destroy the pretense to truth of genre-conventional works by making the writing of fiction principally an exploration of the moral and metaphysical dimensions of recounting as true events that are strictly false.

A convenient table summarizing the two possible, and possibly overlapping, novels called Don Quixote would look something like this:

Written by

Who is a

About a

Scope

Genre

Truth value

Cide Hamete Benengeli

Moor

Squire

Possible worlds

Fiction/poetry

False

Miguel de Cervantes

Christian

Knight errant

Actual world

History

True

What becomes clear in Part II is that Cervantes has attempted to merge himself with the fictional author, Cide Hamete Benengeli, in order to break with the genre of knights-errant literature, to subvert it, by producing a novel that is openly 'Moorish', which is to say openly deceitful, and also openly tricksterish in the comparative-mythological sense of a supernatural being that is able to deceive not just by regular speech, but by spinning out counterfeit worlds. The Cide has accomplished something even more remarkable than this, something more remarkable even than what your average evil deceiver (to invoke a personage from another European work of fiction that would appear a few decades later) might pull off. As the Don and the others begin to realize at the beginning of Part II, he has not just spun out a world out of words and presented it as truth; he has moreover taken their world, the world of the knight and the squire and entourage, which they had previously supposed to be simple fact, and, by writing it, has made it factitious.

Cervantes's invention of the Cide, and his characters' coming to self-consciousness as the inventions of Cide, is a particularly complex variation on the sort of meditation on truth and falsehood, and on poetry and history, that seems to have served as a metafictional accompaniment to many important prose works from the ancient to the early modern periods. Thus Lucian of Samosata in his remarkable second-century CE work of science fiction, the True History, begins with an extremely awkward confession of the author's own recourse to lying, coupled with a hopeful insistence that dishonesty is not so much a cop-out, as it is a necessary element, of story-telling:

I could not condemn ordinary men for lying, when I saw it in request amongst them that would be counted philosophical persons: yet could not but wonder at them, that, writing so manifest lies, they should not think to be taken with the manner; and this made me also ambitious to leave some monument of myself behind me, that I might not be the only man exempted from this liberty of lying: and because I had no matter of verity to employ my pen in (for nothing hath befallen me worth the writing), I turned my style to publish untruths, but with an honester mind than others have done: for this one thing I confidently pronounce for a truth, that I lie: and this, I hope, may be an excuse for all the rest, when I confess what I am faulty in: for I write of matters which I neither saw nor suffered, nor heard by report from others, which are in no being, nor possible ever to have a beginning. Let no man therefore in any case give any credit to them.

It is not Lucian's fault if he has to lie: nothing worth telling has ever in fact happened to him. Reality has not done its part to enable him to be a compelling history-teller, so he will have to be a story-teller instead. He goes on to tell of a trip to the moon, and of a great bell he found there that enabled him to listen in on conversations on earth, and of all sorts of other things that would eventually, more or less, come true.

Prose fiction is born of deceit: it amounts to an adoption of the outer form of history writing --that is, relation of the actual-- in order to explore the possible-but-non-actual, which is supposed to be explored only in verse (at least if we agree with Aristotle, which Cervantes, via Sansón, invites us to do). The outward markers of the exploration of mere possibility, meter and rhyme and so on, are eliminated, and what results is the novel: a straight report of something that did not happen. That the novel is in its essence a dissimulation constituted a clear problem --a moral and philosophical problem: what are we doing and how can we presume to do it?-- for prose fiction writers from Lucian at least through Cervantes, even if the problematic character of the endeavor is subsequently eclipsed with the elevation of the novel to a respectable bourgeois art form, and to a pillar of the display of national cultural greatness.

Flaubert just churned out worlds, and the world itself was in on the game; these worlds, the worlds of the 19th-century realist novel, soon became movies, and by now it is entirely taken for granted that we live alongside multiple parallel worlds. If these raise moral and political problems, problems for censors or ratings boards, these problems are now thought to lie only in the particular content of this or that entertainment, and the idea that the entire undertaking might be a great, morally untenable dissimulation seems to have been entirely occluded.

Or almost entirely. One genre that appears to preserve, and to be sustained by, the same problematic charge that makes Don Quixote a masterpiece is the genre that is sometimes called 'parafiction', the genre of pseudocumentary, of the fake encyclopedia entry, perfected by Borges and evoked in the literary work of Calvino, Bolaño, of Luigi Serafini with his separatist universe encyclopedized in the Codex Seraphinianum, of all the tongue-in-cheek footnotes and pseudo-critical apparatus of the various postmoderns, who seem, in their way, to in fact be returning to a premodern preoccupation with the moral and metaphysical problem of presenting as true what is in fact false, a concern that was only temporarily hidden by the canonization and nationalization of the novel as recently as the 19th century.

The Arthurian romances and knights-errant novels, as Don Quixote's canon (the character, that is) insists, instill an appreciation of the truth, and this is what saves their fabulous, non-actual plots from being found guilty of the sin of lying. They deviate from fact, into fantasy, for the sake of moral truth. But, the canon warns, abandon the normative dimensions of story-telling, and you have nothing left over but a lie. Satire is what happens when the normative dimensions are disowned and mocked, and the author stands open to the accusation of lying, of making shit up, and consequently feels compelled to face, exposed, the philosophical problem of truth and falsehood.

"[Ibn Sa'dān] once said: come let us make this night of ours one of mujūn [libertinism, obscenity] and indulge in much jest [na'khudhu min al-hazli binasibin wāfir] for seriousness has tired us, beaten our energies with sadness. Give us what you have." --Al-Tawhīdī (c. 318-414/930-1023)

*

In response to the recent attempt by some members of PEN to betray persecuted editorialists throughout the world by refusing to honor the survivors of a right-wing death squad's attack on a group of caricature artists in Paris a few months ago, Harper's has taken my April essay out from behind its paywall. Many have been writing on the Internet about their exasperation with all the 'think pieces' on this topic. When will we have finally had enough? they wonder. My answer is that there will be no more need for 'think pieces' when there will be sufficiently serious thinking about this question. What the PEN protesters have given us is a refusal-to-think piece: Twitter-worthy, infantile, presentist American identitarianism that both denies commonalities of experience and history when they are present (as between Europe and the Arab world), and presumes such commonalities when they are in fact absent (as between Anglo-American and French traditions of humor and satire), all on the basis of the ungrounded extension of the currently preferred American analytic lens of 'whiteness' and 'non-whiteness'. This lens certainly reveals quite a bit about American history and its enduring legacies, but very little about the broader history of the Mediterranean and its peoples, against the background of which the recent Charlie Hebdo incident is best understood.

I have been defending Charlie Hebdo, not only on the basis of a commitment to freedom of expression, but also out of an appreciation for what is expressed.Obviously I can't command others to agree with me here, to have a taste for something they simply don't like. I also can't command you to like Lolita, for example. But if all of a sudden I find myself surrounded by people saying that they refuse to approve of, or even to take a look at, a book that condones child rape, I'll be right to judge that this isn't really a question of aesthetic taste or critical judgment in literature; it's a question of political forces, at work perhaps beyond the awareness of the individual reader, that are determining what is to legitimately count as a work of literature.

Honestly, people who have signed the PEN letter are openly admitting that they have never even looked at Charlie Hebdo, and even that they would not be in a position to understand the French if they were to look it. I can accept that your overall judgment of it might, after thorough consideration, be negative (just like you might not like Lolita, Gargantua, Monty Python...), but that is just patently not what is happening here. As I've written elsewhere, it seems to me that Charlie Hebdo has been Justine Sacco'd in the Anglosphere: summarily judged, and then subject to a campaign of ruthless denunciation. Except that Charlie Hebdo is not a Tweet, but a decades-long collaborative endeavor, and those of us in the part of the world that is still capable of interpreting texts and images in a nuanced way are left scratching our heads when we see the unreflective, summary judgment passed on such a complicated body of work --often misfiring, but often unquestionably courageous and unquestionably funny-- as if it were some dumb Tweet or other source of ephemeral online outrage.

I have also maintained elsewhere that the judgment of taste that we so often hear, invoking Charlie Hebdo's vulgarity or childishness, is a sure indication of what is really going on: it is classic Anglo-American arrogant prudishness, mistaking itself for solidarity with the oppressed.The idée fixe among Anglophone would-be progressives has been that Charlie Hebdo is 'crude', 'childish', 'vulgar', or, as Eliot Weinberger curiously put it in the LRB, that it specializes in 'frat-boy humor'. As if France had 'frat boys', and as if jokes about the body and its orifices and noises, and about the delirious variety of human grotesquerie, weren't also the humor of Cervantes and Rabelais. I did not want to get dragged back into the mêlée this time around, but I'm reading Don Quixote right now in Edith Grossman's lovely new translation, and I'm struck by just how much this particular sensibility matters to me, and how much it's worth fighting for in a world that doesn't get it and is afraid of it.

In the Harper's piece what I was trying to do was to insist on a revision of the facile view that what Charlie Hebdo represented was something distinctly and exclusively 'Western', 'Enlightenment-based', etc. Hence my attempt, space permitting, at a sort of genealogy of the joke and of the sources of bawdy literature --of which I see Charlie Hebdo as a descendant-- in pan-Mediterranean oral folklore. I detect here a possibility for going back around all the apparent dichotomies that both French laïcité defenders such as Alain Finkielkraut as well as the American left thinkers who have taken such a firm stance on Charlie Hebdo have helped to perpetuate, and finding a shared history and a common reality.

To put this a bit differently, Rabelais is closer to an anonymous medieval Arab raconteur than he is to, say, Peter Carey. You can classify Charlie Hebdo as a product of the wit-shrouded racism and imperialism of the Enlightenment, assimilating it to Voltaire and so on, but there is an alternative genealogy, which I have been trying to draw out, which connects the modern European satirical tradition to something much larger than Europe, and to something much older than modernity. It is my opponents, and not me, who are perpetuating the ideology of European exceptionalism by acting as though satire has no roots, and can have no purchase, outside of Europe.*

The reason for bringing up Kant and Descartes was not to cow opponents by argument ad auctoritatem, but rather to show that it is not in some supposed superiority of European rationality, as expressed in the European philosophical tradition, that we're going to find an answer to why Europeans supposedly 'get the joke' and why non-Europeans supposedly do not. European philosophy is embarrassed by humor, distances itself from it, and when Kant tries clumsily to engage with it, he shows how unprepared the philosophical tradition is to do so in a rigorous way. So my point was to say that the invocation of 'I think therefore I am' at the Paris rallies after the attacks was misplaced; and that if we want to make sense of Charlie Hebdo's humor, we have to look to a very different domain of culture than philosophy, the one that, again, reaches back genealogically to Rabelais et al. and from there across the Mediterranean to a part of the world Europeans wrongly imagine as the total opposite and negation of their historical experience. But I had to talk about philosophy in order to show why it wasn't delivering the tools to get us out of this apparent impasse.

I am not a big fan of most laïcité rhetoric, and I am sensitive to how it is used for purposes of exclusion. (I am also not listening to what Salman Rushdie is saying on this topic.) This is why I've tried to be consistent about coupling my position on Charlie Hebdo with an equally insistent position on, e.g., the rights and dignity of regular and non-regular ('illegal') migrants to France. I see my position as the one that, more than that of those with whom I disagree, is most insistent that Islam must not be perceived as a monolith, that in fact there is no such thing as the Muslim community, but rather numerous disagreeing factions, by no means all of which agree with the attackers that there is something unacceptably offensive about the content of Charlie Hebdo. Anyhow I do find that the more I defend my own view, the more I detect a certain sclerosis in it, and I'm scared of that too, which is why I've been trying to move on to other things, to come back to this later and see if my view has changed. For now, it hasn't.

--

*If you would like an introduction to some Arabic texts that make Charlie Hebdo's 'frat boy' humor look like pious scriptural commentary, I recommend starting with Zoltan Szombathy's Mujun: Libertinism in Medieval Muslim Society and Literature (2013).

For more on the transmission of literary styles and genres, including 'vulgar' ones, see J. A. Abu Haidar, Hispano-Arabic Literature and the Early Provençal Lyric (2001).

Finally, I've learned a great deal from all the articles in The Rude, The Bad, And The Bawdy: Essays in Honour of Geert Jan Van Gelder. Edited By Adam Talib, Marlé Hammond, and Arie Schippers. Cambridge: Gibb Memorial Trust (2014). Of particular note in this rich volume is Denis McAuley's "Two Fart Jokes in Ibn 'Arabī's Muhādarat Al-Abrār" (198-207).

January 26, 2015

A great many of the features of human existence --the fact that we are haunted by dead ancestors; that the soil is made up of the rotting bodies of living creatures like and including ourselves; that there is not just a question of whether we are bodies, souls, or body-soul compounds, but also of how different parts or regions of our bodies represent different dimensions of what we take to be ourselves; that we live through cycles of night and day and different things seem possible at different moments of these cycles-- are habitually left out of the accounts of human existence offered by philosophy. The great victory of philosophy, in fact, is often held to be that we have got down to the very most basic structure or framework of human existence, from the perspective of which our earth-boundness, or our bipedality, or our diurnality, come to appear contingent. We take space and time as such to be pure forms of intuition, but not the past of the ancestors or the heavenly realm of the angels.

For much of the history of philosophy, the basic orientating points of reference that gave life and sense to human thought were considered alongside the very most abstract frameworks that, one hoped, made this life and sense possible: not just the moral law within, but also the starry heavens above. Aristotle and Kant both, who gave us the most influential categorial schemes, also considered it an integral part of their projects to describe the rich diversity of things given in experience to which these categories apply. Leibniz's entire philosophical project, in turn, might be described as an attempt to show, once the austere metaphysical scaffold has been established, how we get the rich variety of bodily, world-bound experience we do.

But something has gone wrong along the way. These days it is not unusual to hear philosophers saying that it is their goal to give an account of human beings at a level that need not implicate their bodily existence, that abstracts away from the complicating features of world-bound life. I have heard Robert Brandom, for example, saying precisely this about the programmatic uses to which he was putting Leibniz and Spinoza in his ironically titled book, Tales of the Mighty Dead.

It seems much more likely that what permits us to neglect many of what were until extremely recently the basic features of human life is not so much a triumph of abstraction as a triumph of technology: the day-night rhythm, for example, seems less a defining fact about human existence in an era in which we can turn the lights on whenever we wish. It is not clear, however, how quickly a new invention frees us of the old dispositions of mind. We are still afraid of the dark, and we still dream of predating animals. In this respect, the new technology does not so much free us from an old obstacle to thinking about human existence in its pure state, so much as it throws up a new one.

The problem here is not that philosophers are slicing off just one part of the intellectual project of explaining human beings, and that I personally have no taste for that part. The problem is that what we get when we analyze human beings at that level is quite plainly not a model of human beings at all. There is a great deal that philosophers have taken to be eliminable that is not in fact eliminable. There is no meaningful concept of time for example that is not wrapped up with growth and death and aging, and thus that is not mediated by all sorts of rich, if culturally specific, beliefs about society. There is no meaningful concept of space that does not involve positive and negative valuations, psychogeographical projections-- a frightening forest here, a bad neighborhood there, a great sublime ocean between us.

It is not that I want us to apprehend the world in this way, and am wistful about what philosophy has moved away from. It is that we in fact do apprehend the world this way-- perhaps not exactly in the way I've explained, but still in some way that is comparable. We are in fact constrained to apprehend the world as an inhabited, enchanted whorl of beings and forces and vibes good and bad, surely as a result of the way our cognitive apparatus has evolved, but surely no less vividly for that. Yet for the most part philosophy doesn't care.

A very telling example of the dismissive approach to the sort of ineliminable dimensions of human existence I am stressing is Dan Dennett's account of why we continue to fear ghosts and ghouls when we, say, enter a dark attic. It is, Dennett explains, because our brains have evolved into 'hyperactive intentionality detection devices'. Dennett is certainly correct on this point, but the interpretation of what we should do in light of it is just the opposite of what I am suggesting. Dennett believes that empirical science and critical thinking can correct the brain's hyperactivity, and that once we have established what is really there, in the attic, we can move on. The final account of what is there will include only the entities of natural science, and all the products of that earlier hyperactivity will be confined to the history books.

But is the list of these entities really the most useful account we can give of the phenomenology of being-in-dark-attics? Even if we are all committed to a 'just the facts' approach, might not the facts about the particular character of the hyperactive brain's phantasms --that they, say, produce pale dead girls in one time and place, dark old men in another--, be just as relevant to the final description the human sciences would want to give as the list of physical entities present will be to the final description offered by natural science? At issue here, ultimately, is the philosophical question of what counts as a fact, and what I am trying to do is to press for an answer as to why it should be natural science that gets to determine, for philosophy, the answer. To pursue such questions is not to abandon science as a final arbiter, but simply to acknowledge what even the most heavy-handed 20th-century philosophers of science were prepared to recognize: that different levels of description are relevant for different tasks.

It is worth noting en passant that philosophers today are only prepared to scrap those products of evolved hyperactivity that it is socially feasible and morally expedient to scrap: out with the angels and poltergeists and God; but don't worry, no one is going to come for your selfhood, or your private property, or your mid-sized physical objects, or your love. Of course these can be analyzed away too, if the mood hits us, but for the most part we will agree to keep them around, and even to theorize about them. One era's specters to be shooed away are another era's indispensable building blocks of social reality.

Cognitive science, and the philosophy influenced by it, has taken into account the richness I've been trying to evoke-- that we are not just essentially thinking things, but also thinking things with, for example, a special evolved capacity to notice faces that appear in our natural landscape, and to have stronger reactions to them than to lumps of dirt. But cognitive science by itself is ill-equipped to draw out the full significance of the ineliminable features of human cognition that it registers and describes. Philosophers in other areas of specialization need to join the project.

Many in political philosophy are now, promisingly, expressing dissatisfaction with the ideal theory of figures such as Rawls, and pushing for the opening up of this field to marginalized perspectives, which necessarily give a non-ideal picture of things, while revealing that Rawls's abstract and ideal subject was to a great extent a mirror image of himself all along. What this new group of political philosophers seem not to have recognized, yet, is that opening up the field to non-ideal perspectives might not stop, and has no sufficient reason to stop, at the work of feminists or race theorists, who, however much is staked on their difference from Rawls and the others, are still engaging with the classical canon, taking it seriously, defining themselves in relation to it.

There are dimensions of difference undreamt of in non-ideal political theory. These are discovered, among other places, in ethnographic field work, in listening to people who do not set themselves up in society as theorists, who not only do not oppose the preeminence of Rawls but have no idea who he is, as they tell you their conception of the nature and sources of power or community. Those who are opening up political philosophy to include non-ideal theory still expect that we will be getting all of our ideas about the political from theorists of some sort or other, and that as such it is theory rather than expressions of culture that is of final interest to us.

In the 20th century, Ernst Cassirer attempted to keep philosophy focused on culture, took it as one of the central tasks of philosophy to focus its unifying lens on the diversity of human cultural expressions. Ernest Gellner had a similar interest, but drifted further from his starting point in philosophy in order to reestablish himself as a fieldworking anthropologist. Aby Warburg and many other thinkers with a rigorous background in philosophy took it as their task, in one way or another, to give an account of the manifold expressions of culture, and of the logic or structure or sense behind them. This philosophical interest in culture was almost without exception the product of a distinctly mitteleuropäische form of culturedness: mostly German-Jewish and as such the descendants of the Berliner Aufklärung, reverent toward the beautiful things, and capacious enough in its conception of philosophy to work these things into the project of philosophy proper.

There are no philosophers continuing this tradition today, and the sensibility for which they spoke is by now as extinct as the dodo. There are philosophers who engage with what is called 'cultural studies', but the second part of this label, here as elsewhere, implies that those working in this vein have not come to revere, but to break down: they pass straight from ignorance to critique, and have none of the cultivated, encyclopedic, second-nature familiarity with the kaleidoscopic variety of human cultural expressions that enabled the likes of Aby Warburg to speculate, say, on the meaning of the serpent motif in Navajo tapestry. Cultural-studies adepts wish to defend or promote the cultures with which they have some elective or genealogical affinity. But this is something very different from the lost tradition I am evoking. As an object of study, today, philosophers do not care about culture.

Cognitive scientists and political philosophers are opening things up, a bit, but they remain largely indifferent to those ingredients of human existence that I think need to be taken into account in order to get any kind of rich picture of what it is, so to speak, we're really up to: myth, lore, ritual, tapestry motifs, dirty jokes, and other collective phantasms, all studied from a comparative and diachronic perspective. These are, typically, the subject matter of anthropology, and for the most part my philosophy peers look at me like I am stoned when I attempt to argue for their importance. Philosophy does make occasional rather tame gestures toward interdisciplinarity-- psychology and economics are the preferred neighbor disciplines. Like philosophy, these are fields whose members, for their own complicated reasons, chaff at the suggestion that they are involved in 'mere' human sciences, and long for the respectability hard science provides. For any discipline with these aspirations, getting caught mingling with cultural anthropology could only constitute a setback.

Historians of philosophy, for their part, continue to study their canonical figures as if these figures were working with a conception of philosophy as etiolated as their own. But Aristotle and Leibniz and Kant were doing anthropology too. One of the most serious setbacks to philosophy was the separation from it, by a sort of parthenogenesis, of anthropology over the course of the 19th century. One of the most hopeful prospects right now, the boons of which cognitive science has only begun to suggest, is their future reunification. A philosophy that, as part of the study of, say, space and time, gives rich, deep descriptions of the culture-bound experience of space and time by people who are not philosophers, who tell us of the souls below the earth or of the age when humans could still speak with animals: that would be a comprehensive human science.

If it fails to happen, this will be because philosophers continue to balk at the suggestion that their discipline is a human science at all. It is housed with the humanities, but only because they had to put it somewhere. And at least with respect to what it has become, they are right: philosophy is no longer a human science, since it does not study human beings.

December 29, 2014

Over the past few years I have become more involved in what is called the 'art world': promoting and participating in the creation of objects that are, when completed, deemed to belong to that special, narrow class of physical entities at least some people agree to call 'artworks'. I have at the same time been growing ever more convinced that this world and the objects that it produces are a scam, a joke, a frivolity. At least this is what they are if we take them in the ordinary terms in which we are instructed to take them, as being of the same species or at least genus as, say, the Sistine Chapel or Paradise Lost. But far from feeling pressured by this contradiction, between my opinion of current art and my implication in its production, in fact I am perfectly at ease with it. The reason for this becomes clear with a small amount of effort to translate the terms in which artists are in the habit of presenting what they do into terms that are more continuous with what I have myself been trying to do.

Like many people who came up through a training in academic philosophy and who fell, faute de mieux, into an academic career, I have been searching in various ways for opportunities for 'outreach'-- that is, using what I know about philosophy, and about how to teach it, for the benefit of people outside of the traditional venues in which philosophy is taught.

Simultaneously, I have been growing interested, at a practical and theoretical level, in the way in which philosophy as an organized undertaking remains almost exclusively an activity of the geopolitical and economic centers of the world. In this respect, it is very different, for reasons that ought to inspire reflection, from art and literature, and also to some extent from natural science, which thrive in the geopolitical peripheries. This difference can perhaps best be illustrated by a consideration of the completely provincial (or at least regional) scope of interest of the philosophers who come together in hotel conference rooms for the annual conference of the American Philosophical Association. I have trouble thinking of myself as part of the community that organization represents, and not only because I live and work in Europe, but also because its members seem fundamentally incapable of understanding what it is to be a philosopher as something more than being able to rattle off the same list of American (and sometimes British, Canadian, and Australian) names, departments, and annual events, or being able to formulate an opinion on Brian Leiter. How different American philosophers are, in this regard, from writers or artists, or, in a somewhat different way, natural scientists, who are all ready and eager to recognize an Albanian or Iranian, say, as one of their own, so long as that person is a self-identified practitioner of the same ancient craft! Why is there no philosophical equivalent of PEN, that would rally behind a persecuted Iranian philosopher? Why are the annual APA meetings treated as being of such tremendous cosmic significance, while the various modest attempts at global philosophical encounter, such as the World Philosophical Congress, are scoffed at by American philosophers as if they were John Bolton barking at the United Nations? In the end, I think, it's because the people who attend the World Philosophical Congress wear cheap suits and have big moustaches and seem, by American parochial standards, to be generally 'out of it'. But again, in the case of, say, literature or art, there is an underlying shared something that the American and the Albanian practitioners of the ancient craft love, and that they recognize as shared. This shared something takes them beyond the differences of costume and idiom. Is there a comparable something that American philosophers love? I have my doubts.

In short, there are not very many opportunities for philosophical outreach when one travels to the geopolitical peripheries: the discipline of philosophy is just not global enough in its self-conception to make this sort of work feasible. How different the situation is in the art world! And it is not just that art is global in scope and is being produced everywhere. It is also, I have come to think, precisely in the apparent frivolity and fraudulence of contemporary artistic creation that people, particularly young people, throughout the world are attempting to engage with philosophical problems of freedom, identity, the relationship between self and other, between self and world, and so on. As 'art', the work is generally 'bad'. But this judgment is misplaced. We should not be looking at the work. We should be looking at the activity, and the ambitions and energies out of which the work sprays like the wake of a fast-moving vessel.

We need to learn to think about the discipline of philosophy in geopolitical context, but we also need to think about the way in which the ersatz philosophy involved in artistic creation responds to the pressures of 'real-world' politics, the pressures that come down through state coercion and other forms of violence and that loom as an ineradicable image of all that is not-art. This situation became particularly clear to me during a recent visit to the Art Academy of Palestine in Ramallah. The trip was semi-secret at the time, and even now the purpose of the trip will have to wait for another occasion to be told. Suffice it to say that the nature of the project was entirely apolitical. It speaks volumes about the current situation that simply having human and creative contact with Palestinians at all, simply being hosted by Palestinians, comes across to many as some sort of radical stance. It certainly didn't feel radical. Nor, for that matter, do I think there's any radicalism in acknowledging the grotesque, inhuman, and degrading character of the Israeli occupation.

I met delightful people --people with whom you too would want to be friends, eminently cultured people if that helps to win you over--, whose 14-year-old sons are currently on trial, and threatened with years of prison, effectively for the crime of having strayed outdoors during the demonstrations in the West Bank against the siege of Gaza some months ago.

Some of my 'Western' collaborators preferred to arrive on buses via Jordan. I was far more, well, flexible: I flew to Tel Aviv, and I continue to maintain connections both personal and professional within Israel. My reasoning about this has been complicated, but, I hope, not tortured or self-deceiving. My own grandparents moved westward across the US to California in the late 1930s, thus about a decade after the last battles in Nevada and Utah of the so-called 'Indian Wars' that had begun some centuries earlier in Virginia, and that had resulted in the near-total genocide of the continent. Unlike many of my Israeli friends, my own ancestors were not themselves fleeing genocide in Europe, but, at worst, poverty. So I'm not prepared, as a European-American, to isolate my Israeli friends.

To invoke the parallel experience of the appropriation of the American frontier, moreover, is not to reach back into some dark prehistory, where what's done is done: in fact the idea that all that is by now 'just history' is precisely what enables us Americans to go about our lives without, for the most part, any serious moral reckoning. But if I can't isolate Israel as exceptional in its displacement of Palestinians, coming to Palestine, for me, does instill a sharp sense of a need for moral reckoning all around, and --more usefully-- a sense of duty to publicly oppose the oppression and disenfranchisement of the Palestinians by Israel. One thing that is very striking, and that one can only see by traveling on both sides of the pre-1967 border, is the way in which Israel, with vastly superior resources, is effectively building a new political reality directly into the infrastructure of the whole region: there is now a multi-lane highway that goes straight to the Ariel settlement in the West Bank, for example. How could Ariel fail to be part of Israel proper, if it is connected by a multi-lane highway to Tel Aviv? These construction projects go on unslowed no matter what the Israeli politicians are saying to the worried but easily distracted members of the international community. The construction of tram lines in Jerusalem functions in much the same way. Palestinian institutions in East Jerusalem do not have to include the word 'Israel' in their official mailing addresses, but they do have to live with IDF forces patrolling the streets outside. And the eventual aim is clear enough to the outside visitor: it is to push out or minimize these institutions, to make them 'just history' in a way that occludes from view the urgency of moral reckoning, just like the malls and interstates of California, which seemed so rock-solid and legitimate in my childhood, occluded from view the genocide that had made them possible.

While I am ambivalent about the prospect of a boycott of Israel --there are simply too many Israelis with genuinely progressive political sensibilities to make their isolation sensible-- what I am not ambivalent about is the crucial importance of supporting Palestinian institutions, particularly those that help to advance artists and writers and others who can testify, in ways that outsiders cannot easily shut out, to the share these people have in universal human experience. It is important to not let anyone insinuate, as often happens, that any Palestinian institution must be backed up, ultimately, by dark illiberal forces, and that to get involved with them is to invite taint. Israel wins the propaganda war for the hearts and minds of Americans (at least), in large part by conveying an image of itself as made up of liberal, free individuals, who have gay-pride parades and night clubs, and philosophy departments at their universities, in contrast with the undifferentiated masses of rock-throwers and others in such a degraded state that the liberal spirit, whose presence is an outward sign of kindredness for us Westerners, is not able to flourish. But this is a lie. My Palestinian friends like philosophy and all that good stuff too, but it doesn't help them much to keep their kids out of Israeli jails.

It is telling --the more telling the more I think about it-- that while exchange in my capacity as a philosopher is easy to arrange with Israeli institutions, by far the easier way to make contact with Palestinian institutions is as an ambassador of art: philosophy for the country that built itself on the model of European culture and values, and that gets colored as 'center' on any world-systems-theory map of the centers and peripheries; art, by contrast, for the colonized people who were pushed to the periphery in the creation of this new European state.

So art it has to be, if one is serious about outreach. One crosses that horrible wall, with the barbed wire and the signs that tell you you are going into 'Area A' of the Palestinian Authority, that it is illegal and dangerous for Israeli citizens to do so. And one travels to Ramallah in a taxi with Hebrew words on its doors, one winces and waits for the stones to hit. But they do not, and so one arrives, and goes into the academy, and encounters there a species of young people immediately recognizable from so many other spots in the world. They are refined, gracile, welcoming; a copy of Finnegan's Wake sits on a desk. They wear those silly Andean knit hats with the flaps that hang down over the ears, and have double-pierced noses. They speak in a stream-of-consciousness way about their artistic ambitions and visions. This way of being, the way of being of the artist, is a sort of cultivation of freedom, possible even under severely limiting circumstances of war, and terror, of checkpoints and visa restrictions. It is a miracle that such freedom is possible, but when you meet young artists in Ramallah, you know with certainty that it is. You also see, in a way that is less evident among the trust-funded MFA students of Cooper Union, that right here may well be that supremely philosophical purpose of art anticipated by Friedrich Schiller: the realization of freedom in artistic creation.

This purpose is not as frivolous as some of the external signs of its presence, and indeed sometimes makes itself known in the realm of non-art, in the realm of visa processing and border controls. At the National Gallery of Kosovo in October I saw an exhibition by a young Kosovar artist that 'explored' the strange phenomenon of applying for a special 'artist status' visa in order to travel to Western Europe. The work was not terribly interesting, but it no doubt served the intended purpose: to help the artist get an artist visa. People become artists not so much by creating works of art, but by wearing Andean earflap hats and otherwise conducting themselves as artists. And this opens up worlds to them, and frees them, to some extent, from the shitty world created and maintained by the forces of non-art. There is the further question of where this leaves all those people who are too poor or exploited or otherwise perhipheralized to procure for themselves an artist's hat and to master the artist's habitus. But still, it's a beautiful thing: a tiny rupture in an otherwise dreary and necessitarian system. This is as much as Schiller dared hope for.

September 10, 2014

One day I'm sitting in a rented SUV in a traffic jam, near yet far from LaGuardia, listening to NPR. Some harmless duffer, probably wearing a bowtie and a Yankees cap, is waxing sentimental about the great baseball stadiums of yore. I get in a plane and the next day I'm back in France and the taxi driver is listening to France Culture. Some professor is on, talking about Maurice Blanchot, who suspects that what we all really want, deep down, is to get spanked.

So I'm back in France. I came out of the airplane into a gauntlet of ads from HSBC, the ones asking you to imagine what banking is going to be like in the future. Whenever I see them I imagine how they will look --sorry, how they would look-- sticking out of post-apocalyptic rubble.

Really, I'm sorry. Elif Batuman has announced that we've exited the age of irony and have entered the age of awkwardness. Oy, Elif, I just can't keep up with all the ages, and I suppose that in itself is a prescription for countless awkward encounters. Anyhow I'm still dwelling on how ironic, not awkward, all the feverish proclamations of capitalism triumphant are going to look someday.

Now I'm back home, back in Europe. Where? When I got my French cellphone contract they told me I would have to call for a special forfait prior to any trips to North America, but they assured me I could use it anywhere in 'Europe'. This sounded strange, and ill-defined. I asked if I could use it in Romania. Yes, of course, the agent replied. Bulgaria? Yes. Croatia? I think so. Montenegro? Um. Moldova? Uh. Chechnya? No, definitely not. The poor young man was laughing, and a bit annoyed, but he got my point. Europe's vagueness is intrinsic to its constitution. This is what makes the E.U. so hard to transform into a political reality. It is not that it is 'porous', or that its boundaries are not secure, but rather that there is a vast region that is itself a great, planar boundary zone. It is, perhaps, that part of Europe that puts carpets on its walls, or the part that has a historical memory of Mongol or Turkic reigns. Except that for any attempt to define it, one can always come forth with a compelling reason to move 'it' a bit further west.

It is significant, more significant than anyone has appreciated since the Pax Americana settled over Western Europe in 1945, that during the war 'Hun' had served as a catch-all insult for Germans and Japanese alike (and implicitly, though this created a bit of a problem in accounting for the allied Russians, for everyone in between). A 'Hun' is a Eurasian, which up until the end of World War II included everyone from the Pacific coast all the way to Mitteleuropa. After the war, Germany was split, and the DDR fell into the sphere of influence of the Soviets. Tales are numerous of babies with demi-Mongolian features cropping up all over Berlin around, let's see, midwinter, 1946. I recall many people, among them my father, crossing Checkpoint Charlie in the mid-1980s and reporting back that the soldiers patrolling the streets of East Berlin were 'Central Asian' or 'Mongolian' (read 'Hunnic') in appearance. This commonplace endures. Thus Tim Judah, filing for the New York Review of Books from Russian-occupied eastern Ukraine, writes: "The tanks looked relatively modern. As they pulled away, a man whose head was sticking out of the hatch at the top of a tank waved at us. His features were central Asian." Judah is telling the truth, of course, but he is also playing on an ancient fear about the identity of Europe, one that seems little changed since Batu Khan's hordes faced Yuri II of Vladimir in 1237.

The Russians, many recently realigned Eastern Europeans now think, are the true descendants of the Mongol Horde. They bring the soldiers with the Asiatic physiognomies. This is what determines where the absolute boundaries must be drawn. This is what motivates Obama's speechwriters to write that "the defense of Tallinn and Riga and Vilnius is just as important as the defense of Berlin and Paris and London." This is what brings NATO forward with its righteous Hollywood teleology, and this is what makes Putin puff out his chest and insist upon his terrible counter-history, his hordic revenge.

When I was studying in Leningrad a quarter-century ago, there was much hand-wringing about the identity of Russia, and its place in a changing world. "Are we European, or are we Asian?" This struck me as a childish, pointless question. Now I see it is a gravely important one, so important that the very future of the world may hang on its satisfactory resolution. That there is no real answer, that no amount of scrutiny of maps or of soil, or measurement of lines of latitude or of magnetic variation, could possibly resolve the question, can only make it all the more disconcerting that ICBMs are involved.

But I love Europe: I need to be in the place that is being fought over. That was always the attraction of Berlin, whatever the idiot youngsters are saying about that city today, about its 'urban spaces' and 'creative redesigns'.

When I was growing up on a defunct chicken farm in the central valley of California, there was a great barn out back in which someone had dumped thousands of books. They were covered in chicken shit, and they were the first books that truly provoked my imagination, made me a bibliophile... a coprobibliophile. Most of them would have been shit even without the shit: large-print Reader's Digest versions of the classics, wit and wisdom from Lady Bird Johnson, the 1971 AAA guide to the motor inns of Utah, etc. But there was one book that stuck out, that demanded to be cleaned off and studied: it was, I think, a 1975 statistical report of the Bundesministerium für Ernährung, Landwirtschaft und Forstenconcerning the number of hectares of uncultivated forest in the Federal Republic of Germany. The key thing is that it was in German, and for me to find it there was a highly improbably sort of magic. I took it inside and treated it like a holy text, and opened it up and marveled at its impossibly long words, and at the thought that these words could actually have a meaning. Everything I've ever done since has been an attempt to unravel that meaning, and others like it.

But still, there is America, and what I love most about living in Europe, perhaps, is that I can now experience the continent of my birth with a similar sense of marvel and strangeness to the one with which I had so long experienced the continent of my ancestry. I can go there, to New Jersey, say, and I can feel the autumn beginning to set in, and I can feel, sharply, the great violence that made New Jersey possible, and the millennia that preceded it too. Or at least I think I can. Anyhow I feel estranged, in the proper sense: made into an étranger.

It is significant that one of the founding myths of the continent on which I currently find myself has to do with the rape of a Phoenician woman. Alternative translations will tell you that we should understand this 'rape' rather as a ravishment, or, seemingly much more innocuously, as an abduction. Yet we mustn't exaggerate the difference of connotation. One of the core features of Eurasian folk culture, spreading from the Adriatic Sea to Eastern Turkestan, is the idea that marriage is itself a rape or ravishment or taking-away for the purpose of non-consensual sex. This transgression must be enacted, if only ritualistically, in the wedding celebration. The family, with its recently discovered 'values', is a product of unspeakable violence. This is the anthropology of kinship, in Europe as in Asia. This is the story that gives Europe its name.

May 18, 2014

God, on a certain widespread understanding, is an imaginary friend for the childish and simpleminded. Those so accused will often defend themselves: but I don't mean a white-bearded old-man God. I just mean, you know, something. A first mover, a ground, an ultimate end of the series of causes. If that all sounds too medieval, then you are free to invoke some vague and universalist notion of a 'higher power', which we cannot know directly but in reference to which our own lower powers, of goodness and love in particular, make sense. God can be mostly gutted of mythology, and with some success re-stuffed and propped back up as a pure product of reason, or even just of right-mindedness.

Not so with the angels: there is likely no way to enter into angelological disquisitions without being received as a hollering streetcorner proselytizer, with those bright, kitschly illustrated pamphlets depicting life in the clouds. God might not be an old man with a beard, but angels are always ridiculous wingèd humanoids in white, perverted fat cherubim, Michael Landon. They are for sad and lonely people with diminished resources, people locked away in rest homes, who live their lives anchored to the cycle of the daytime TV line-up.

A pair of considerations, coming from the history of European philosophy, might help to liberate the angels from this reduced and degraded repertoire. The medieval period is of course often mocked as the span of centuries in which philosophers wasted their inborn talents debating pointless questions about angels on the heads of pins. But as many scholars have noted, this long period is by no means static, and what we in fact see is a gradual progression from the 12th to the 16th centuries in which angels evolve, from beings whose nature and properties are in need of straightforward explanation, to the posits of thought experiments. It becomes ever less important to account for how angels actually are, and ever more important to use the concept of angels in the analysis of, say, intelligence, or individual substance, in order to better be able to account for what these things are. (And these things are, the reader is imagined to presume, more plausible candidates for the status of actual things than angels are.)

Now it might be supposed that this changing role is simply a stage on the path to the eventual full disappearance of the angels from the way we talk about the world. This would not be entirely incorrect, and it brings us to our second point: between roughly 1650 and 1750, angels appear to be replaced by aliens. To put this slightly differently, talk of supernatural beings intermediate between God and men gives way to talk of advanced celestial beings that are far greater than human beings, but not for that reason supernatural. There is virtually no European philosopher writing in this period who does not affirm their existence, under various descriptions and titles. Leibniz called them génies, Kant conceived them as "the more perfect classes of rational beings."The reasons for this transformation are several, and it has most importantly to do with the uniformization of nature, the collapse of the distinction between the superlunar and the terrestrial spheres, and the consequent rise of what is sometimes called 'the Harlequin principle': the idea that toujours et partout, c'est tout comme ici.

I've written about this transformation at great length elsewhere. What I want to emphasize here is something different: that you can't get rid of the angels. You push them out of your ontology, or you allow them to remain only as etiolated conceptual posits without any real being of their own, and lo, they return in a new guise: from the angelic hierarchies of Ezekiel to the many-worlds fantasies of early modern science fiction, it has proven exceedingly hard for human beings to think of themselves as the end of the line, as the ne plus ultra of the cosmos's various actors.

One might mention at this point the fellow beings, convoked or hallucinated, whenever DMT is illegally ingested (and thus adds to the DMT already naturally occurring-- your brain is always already on drugs), and one might in the same breath recall the SETI program and the vain hurling of bottled messages, in the form of radio waves, out into space. Both of these experiences, in very different senses of the word 'experience', and from very different spheres of contemporary culture, reinforce the idea, as it is also often said of God, that there simply has to be something. We cannot get these beings out of our minds-- our minds even seem neurochemically predisposed to recall them to attention under certain circumstances.

The astrophysicists engaged in the search for extraterrestrial life generally suppose that this search is limited to our xenobiological counterparts, and does not concern disembodied or ethereal beings, but only beings of flesh and blood, or whatever the materials are on the extraterrestrial's planet that come together to constitute something we would be in a position to recognize as a living body. But the search itself is the practical culmination of the speculation that we see in Leibniz and Kant, and this speculation is plainly the descendant of angelology. We conceive the celestial beings according to the idiom and conventions of our era, and so in this era of naturalism they are organic beings, like us, with internal organs, mixtures of fluids and soft parts and bone, that come together for a time as a result of natural generation. They are generally humanoid. But just a moment of reflection should suffice to reveal the improbability of such a situation. Extraterrestrials as currently conceived are arguably just as absurd, and just as much a reflection of our own cultural moment, as the Seraphim and Elohim have been to those whose world is shaped by the Talmud.

Do I believe in angels? Well, I believe that supramundane intelligences are not going to go away, and this quite apart from the question whether they turn out in the end to exist or not. With angels as with God, our own era has lapsed into a sort of thinking that would be more appropriate to the search for Bigfoot: looking for clumps of rough orange hair brushed off on trees, for footprints and photographs. Though even here there is room for debate: Tim Ingold for example argues that cryptozoology is but an impoverished form of mythology, and that it is always a misunderstanding to attempt to give a biological account of the beings that play a role in our cognitive and imaginative landscape without for that reason needing to exist as masses of hair and flesh and blood. I believe it is very plausible to see SETI and similar undertakings, in the same way, as impoverishments of premodern angelology. It is not at all that I am opposed to xenobiology as a collective scientific project. But I do wish that there were improved understanding of the ways in which our contemporary preoccupations are rooted in deep history, and emerge out of preoccupations that only appear foreign and distant as a result of our general and total historical illiteracy.

I believe we need to pay serious attention to the recurring patterns in the way human cultures experience the world as filled and animated by different classes of being. This can be done scientifically, and indeed is far truer to the spirit of science than the thick-skulled and thoroughly uninteresting dichotomization of the existent and the non-existent that currently prevails in the tedious Culture War opposition between believers and non-believers.

People experience the world as filled and animated by beings of all sorts. Daniel Dennett calls this our evolved hyperactive intentionality detection device. This may be the case. It may also be that my pervasive habit of thinking about myself, say, or of Dan Dennett, as the sort of things it would be a shame to kill needlessly is the result of an evolved hyperactive morally-relevant-entity-detection device. In all these cases, though, whatever the evolutionary account that can be given, there is surely also an interesting fact --a phenomenological fact, an anthropological fact, perhaps a moral fact, and perhaps even a theological fact-- that people tend to experience the world in the way they do. For certain immediate purposes in everyday life it is a lot harder to dispatch the self or midsized physical objects than it is to get rid of angels, and this is perhaps why we still allow people to deploy the latter sort of evolved detection device, while we ridicule people who mistake the former for a revelation of angels, ghosts, or benevolent ancestors.

But beyond the accomplishment of these simple tasks --opening doors, asking for directions-- there are the full and rich lives we live out, made rich largely by the stories we tell and the beings that figure into these stories, whose existence as clumps or masses does not require proof. This aspect of life receives little attention, or is only condescendingly and passingly treated, by the prideful professional spokesmen for the exhaustiveness of contemporary science. It is here, in these stories --'in loving repetition', as Les Murray describes religious faith-- that one encounters the angels.

May 17, 2014

[From an essay forthcoming in Paul North and Eyal Peretz (eds.), Protocols for Another Nature]

‘Nature’, in common usage, can mean a number of different things. Sometimes it refers to the external world, and more particularly to the earth’s surface, and more particularly still to that part of the earth’s surface made up of biomass. In the same general conceptual vicinity, we also find the notion of nature as environment, as the surrounding medium through which we move. At other times, ‘nature’ refers to the particular nature of a given being, or what is sometimes called ‘essence’-- what it is to be a particular entity rather than another.

The first sense of ‘nature’ reflects the word’s etymology, which is rooted in the Latin verb nasci, ‘to be born’. Nature, on this understanding, is that which undergoes generation and growth (and generally also corruption or death). This connection between nature and birth is similarly reflected in the Slavic and many other Indo-European languages (in Russian, for example, nature is priroda, connected to the verb rodit’sia, ‘to be born’; in the Sanskrit prakṛti by contrast the verbal root has to do more with active creation than with generation). If less evidently, the concepts of generation and growth are also embedded in the Greek term physis, from which of course we get both ‘physical’ and what is sometimes held to lie beyond this, the ‘metaphysical’.

In Aristotle, physis describes what is everywhere the same, in contrast with human-based nomos or ‘custom’: thus he observes in the Nicomachean Ethics that in Persia as in Greece, fire burns the same.[1] This burning is governed by nature rather than by culture, and therefore national boundaries have no bearing on it. Yet nature as the indifferent background to or support of human life is not prior, conceptually or temporally, to nature as essence. In fact, the first occurrence of physis, in Homer’s Odyssey, refers to the particular nature of a plant: here we read of Argeiphontes, who draws a plant from the ground and shows it to the narrator, revealing its unique physis.[2]

How are these two primary meanings of ‘nature’ related? And what is the significance of their lexical overlap? In Aristotle, physis had been in different senses both the matter and form of a thing, that is, both the ‘physical’ stuff from which a thing is made, as well as the immaterial principle that makes that stuff into a particular thing. In the modern period, there would be little room for form, and we see attempts such as Descartes’s to account for all of nature as consisting entirely in the modifications of res extensa or extended stuff. Eventually, the notion of the ‘metaphysical’ would take on connotations very much like the ‘supernatural’, which latter is in the end a Latin rendering of the former Greek, even if the two terms have had very different and only partially overlapping histories. For many in the modern period, beginning roughly in the era of Descartes, we are left with nature, or nothing at all (except in the very reduced domain of the human soul): there can be no principles above or outside of the natural world giving it shape or imbuing individual things with their particular natures, and nor can this ‘within’ be conceived as consisting in immaterial principles such as form or entelechy or soul.

Nature is also often held to be a first principle or a source, a behind-the-scenes operator that makes the scene what it is. In this role it can move between both form and matter: on the one hand, it is the essence, or the immaterial something that makes a bodily being the sort of being it is; on the other hand, nature is the formless generative stuff out of which forms arise. In this latter role, it is sometimes popularly envisioned as ‘Mother Nature’, a personification that is not at all surprising when we bear in mind the etymology of the term. Nature so conceived is not just a source but also a ‘secret’: as Pierre Hadot has compellingly shown, the idea that ‘nature loves to hide’, first expressed in an enigmatic fragment of Heraclitus, is very deeply rooted in Western intellectual traditions.[3]

Nature, as we have seen, sometimes contrasts with social or custom-based nomos, and at other times it contrasts with what is above or outside of nature; it also contrasts with the unnatural. This latter term itself is understood in many different ways. Often, ‘unnatural’ is used simply as a veiled moral judgment, against ‘sodomy’, for example, or pizza for breakfast. To identify a thing or a deed as unnatural here is simply to disapprove of it, while invoking, plausibly or implausibly, an eternal moral order that somehow governs the order of nature. Beyond simple moral judgment, the ‘unnatural’ can be understood to describe products of human activity that violate or go against the proper functioning of nature, or, in turn, simply those products of human activity that cause nature to do something it wouldn’t ordinarily do, and this for the betterment of human life. While Aristotle excludes most products of the technical arts [technai] from the domain of the natural, he also recognizes that not all art is merely imitative: “the arts either, on the basis of Nature, carry things further [epitelei] than Nature can, or they imitate [mimeitai] Nature.”[4] As William R. Newman notes, for Aristotle certain artisanal procedures, such as broiling and boiling, are also natural processes,[5] and so their products can be understood as natural, albeit ‘perfected’ --not in the sense of outdoing nature, but more modestly of improving or furthering its works-- through human ingenuity.[6]

There does not seem to be any clear criteria by which to judge a particular artificial process imitative or perfective, but there is a clear evaluative judgment in this distinction: if we manipulate nature, we should be careful to limit our manipulation to steward-like direction, rather than setting ourselves up as gods capable of reproducing nature by our design and for our own ends. All three of these sense of ‘unnatural’ --as setting ourselves up as the makers of processes that imitate nature, as harnessing for our own ends the latent powers of nature, and, finally, as moral transgression-- blend easily into one another. Wherever human beings probe too deeply into nature’s hidden forces, there is a perceived threat of what Newman nicely calls ‘Promethean ambition’: getting into trouble by attempting, as they say, to play God. The poet James Merrill describes this condition forcefully in his lines, from The Changing Light at Sandover, on nuclear technology: “Powers at the heart of matter, powers / We shall have hacked through thorns to kiss awake, / Will open baleful, sweeping eyes, draw breath / And speak new formulae of megadeath.”[7]

7.2. The unnatural as mimetic artifice (including the mechanical reproduction of natural systems).

In view of this tremendous polysemy of the term in question, it is worth revisiting a well-known scholarly thesis, most closely associated with the innovative work of Carolyn Merchant, according to which the early modern period witnessed the ‘death of nature’. This death is supposed to have been caused by the equally well-known ‘mechanization of the world picture’, whose principal agent, or culprit, René Descartes is often taken to be. But which nature, exactly? Surely Descartes could not have taken down all of these different senses of the term together? In fact, when Merchant speaks of the death of nature, she has in mind only 7.2 above. She believes that as a result of the scientific revolution, we have lost a world that was ‘organic’, and we have reconceptualized the entire world instead on the model of the machines of our own invention. For 16th-century Europeans, she explains, “the root metaphor binding together the self, society, and the cosmos was that of an organism.”[8] As a result of the scientific revolution, by some time in the 17th century, Merchant believes, the world came to be conceived as a machine rather than an organism, as a clockwork rather than a living being. In its core claims Merchant’s account differs little from the triumphalist historiography that long dominated in the secondary literature on the early modern European rise of science: she simply describes disapprovingly what E. J. Dijksterhuis and Alexandre Koyré in their classic studies, for example, relate with pride.[9]

But why should we suppose that 16th-century Europeans had any particularly valuable insights into the nature of the surrounding world and of our place within it? By now the ‘death of nature’ thesis has been criticized on many fronts, but so far most of them have remained within a philosophical and idea-historical perspective which takes for granted the universal validity of the classical Western concept of physis or natura, and fail to take seriously the significant comparative evidence for the peculiarly local dimensions of the history of the concept of nature, or of concepts from the non-European world that partially overlap with nature. The announcement of nature’s death turns out to be little more than a notice of death within a fairly small parish, and this parochial perspective makes it very difficult to take adequate stock of the real significance of the local changes that occurred in the history of the concept at the beginning of European modernity.

In the modern period, nature, notwithstanding rumors of its death, is alive and well. It is not the case that until the modern period Europeans and non-Europeans alike were blissfully pananimist, and that with the rise of science the Europeans turned their nature into a machine while the rest of the world went on happily conceptualizing it as a living, growing, vital being that existed in constant harmonious interchange with human society. This account is inadequate for two reasons. First, the mechanical world picture never became hegemonic in modern European philosophy, or even predominant, notwithstanding the prevailing interpretation offered in much 20th-century historiography. Leibniz, for example, continued to believe long after Descartes that nothing happens in nature that is not underlain by the activity of a mind-like entity; well into the 20th century, moreover, there is a prominent tradition of vitalistic natural philosophy that disputes the central claim of the mechanistic world picture, namely, that all natural change can be accounted for in terms of the mass, figure, and motion of intrinsically inert physical particles. Second, there is no real evidence that the picture of human society existing in harmonious interchange with a living nature is the picture of humanity’s place in the world is, in a cross-cultural light, the default conception of humanity’s place in the world. The best evidence suggests not that non-Western people inhabit a society cradled within a living nature, but that there simply is no meaningful distinction between society and nature at all.

Before moving to some properly ethnographic examples, it is important to bear in mind that, as with so many other concepts, when it comes to ‘nature’ even the European past is a sort of foreign country. The concept has undergone radical transformations over the centuries, and there is little that binds the Greeks, Romans, medievals, and early moderns. Our own conception of ‘nature’, finally, which takes places like Yellowstone National Park as its paradigm instances, is an extremely recent, mostly 19th-century innovation.

As Philippe Descola argues in his important 2005 work, Par-delà nature et culture, ‘wild’ and ‘domestic’ are subject to a rare polarization in Western history; even in other agricultural societies, what we tend to find more often are “multiple forms of gradual discontinuity or englobing.”[10] In the West, by contrast, these notions are “mutually exclusive and only acquire their entire meaning when they are brought into a complementary opposition to one another.”[11] Outside of Europe, the ‘mental and technological contexts’ did not “favor the emergence of a mutually exclusive distinction between that which is anthropized and a residual sector that is unuseful to people, or destined to fall to their domination.”[12] Within Europe, by contrast,

a major contrast takes shape that of course opposes cultivated to non-cultivated spaces, but also, and above all, domestic animals to wild animals, the world of the stables and of grazing space to the realm of the hunter and of game.. Perhaps such a contrast was even sought out and maintained in an active way in order to preserve spaces where qualities could be exercised --such as the ruse, physical endurance, the pleasure of conquest-- that, outside of war, could no longer find an outlet within the very controlled space of the agricultural field.[13]

Again, however, Europe is by no means an eternal and static entity, and we see radical changes over time in the understanding of the division between the human realm and the natural realm. For the Greeks, “the habitat of the wild beasts constitutes an indispensable belt of non-civilization that enables it to thrive, a theater where it can exercise its virile dispositions that are the polar opposite of the virtues of conciliation required in the treatment of domestic animals and in the political life.”[14] In medieval Europe, particularly in the Germanic realm, the ‘belt’ of nature around human settlements would be increasingly conceptualized as part of society, as a carefully kept zone in which privileged members of society could cultivate particular virtues. Surprisingly, in this respect, forests full of ‘wild’ animals were in some sense more tightly controlled by human beings than were pastoral spaces in which domestic animals were permitted to graze. A prohibition on grazing in a given space does not preserve its wildness, but rather sets it apart as an artificially maintained non-grazing zone, an exception to the dominant human economic order that is made all the more human in virtue of its exceptional status:

If it is not the straightforward opposite of the agricultural enterprise, the domain of the Wild is not any less socialized. It is identified with the great forest, not with the silva that is unproductive and that impedes colonization, but with the foresta, this giant game park that, from the 9th century, the Carolingian dynasty undertakes to create by means of edicts that limit the rights of pannage and of defilement.[15]

In a sense, the culmination of this process of incorporation through preservation, that is, of making a region a part of human society by keeping it cordoned off from certain types of human use, can be seen in the creation of national parks, the first of which appear in the United States, under Theodore Roosevelt’s administration and at the energetic encouragement of the romantically inclined Scottish-American thinker John Muir. It was in this period, Descola maintains, that

the moral and aesthetic dimension that continues to color our appreciation of these places. This is the epoch, we know, in which romanticism invents wild nature and propagates a taste for it: this is the epoch in which the essayists of the philosophy of wilderness, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, or John Muir, incite their compatriots to look, in their visits to the American mountains and forests, for an existence that is more free and more authentic than the one for which Europe had long furnished the model. It is also the epoch in which the first national park is created, at Yellowstone, as a grandiose staging of the divine work.

The language of ‘staging’ is Muir’s own, not Descola’s. When Ralph Waldo Emerson attempted to entice Muir, in his distant outpost in California, to accept a faculty position at Harvard, the author responded stubbornly: “I never for a moment thought of giving up God’s big show for a mere profship!”[16] Muir takes his refusal to be one in favor of a timelessly and self-evidently distinct zone of reality: he is on the side not just of trees and mountains, but also of the transcendent creator, with whom direct contact is facilitated by means of an attunement with the mountains and trees. This zone is in turn contrasted with the artificial, the institutional, and even with the ‘back East’ that precedes, historically and conceptually, the braving of the great frontier that did so much to shape 19th-century ideas about nature. And significantly, Muir seems entirely unaware of the historical conditioning of his preference for nature, and of the way in which his essays, his lobbying, and his mediation between the East Coast and Yellowstone themselves amount to a domestication of the natural.

One of the great problems in Western thinking about nature over the past several centuries is that we have transported throughout the world “a very particular vision of [our] environment, a great baggage of prejudices and sentiments,” that the Amazonians, for example, would find utterly unfamiliar. Descola writes of the voyage in the early 20th century of the Belgian artist Henri Michaux to the Amazon:

The conquest of virgin spaces was for [Michaux’s company] a tangible reality and a desirable goal, as well as an attenuated and confused echo of a more fundamental contrast between nature and civilization. All of this, we discern, would have made no sense to the Indians who see in the forest something quite different from a savage place to be domesticated or a motif for aesthetic delectation. It is true that the question of nature hardly comes up for them. Thus we have a fetish of our own, a very effective one at that, just like all the objects of belief that people offer themselves in order to act upon the world.[17]

Many non-European groups, in Descola’s view, seem to be better able to think about the wilderness without setting it apart from the zone of human existence as if it were on the other side of some ontological divide. Thus for example Descola notes that

certain peoples of Amazonia are perfectly aware of the fact that their cultural practices have a direct influence on the distribution and reproduction of wild plants. This phenomenon of indirect anthropization of the forest ecosystem, long misunderstood, was well described in the studies of William Balée on the historical ecology of the Ka’apor of Brazil. Thanks to a precise labor of identification and counting, he was able to establish that the clearings that have been abandoned for more than forty years are twice as rich in useful species of plant than the neighboring portions of the primary forest that however they hardly distinguish at first glance…. Pursued for millennia in a great part of Amazonia, this fashioning of the forest ecosystem certainly contributes not a little to legitimating the idea that the jungle is a space that is as domesticated as the gardens.[18]

For our purposes, what is significant about Descola’s sweeping account are the implications it holds for the ‘death of nature’ thesis, that is, for the idea that until modernity Western thinkers had a conception of nature as vital and agentive; further, implicitly, that to the extent that nature was conceived in this way pre-modern Westerners also had a conception of nature more or less continuous with that of people in other parts of the world. What this account misses is, first of all, that modes of production, as well as ecological circumstances, significantly impact the human conceptualization of the surrounding environment, and that here the most important shift in Western history is not at all the scientific revolution of the 17th century, but rather the agricultural revolution several millennia prior. Second, it appears characteristic of those cultures in which nature is not set apart from human culture as if across an ontological divide, that precisely in virtue of the absence of such a divide there can be no need for a distinct concept of nature.

That is, nature comes into existence as a concept precisely to the extent that humanity sets itself up against it. We must therefore not imagine that indigenous peoples throughout most of human history thought of themselves as living ‘in harmony’ with nature, any more than they thought of hunting and gathering as ‘a good line of work’. Nature could not have been killed by Western thinking, if it only existed in the first place as a concept to the extent that it measured the human sense of distinctness from the external world. And when it is finally supposed to have died, in the modern period, what we in fact witness is a widening of the gap, or a more thorough clearing of the belt that Descola perceived already surrounding the Greek polis, and so, ultimately, a strengthening of the ontological division between the ‘in here’ and the ‘out there’. Various ‘back to nature’ sentiments of late modernity, including Muir’s, and including the occasional camping trips of educated urbanites, are a symptom of this division, and not an overcoming of it. They have nothing to do with a return to the way in which some imagined prelapsarians once experienced the world around them.

[8] Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution, San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1980, 1.

[9] See E. J. Dijksterhuis, The Mechanization of the World Picture: Pythagoras to Newton, tr. C. Dikshoorn, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961; Alexandre Koyré, Du monde clos à l’univers infini, Paris: Gallimard, 2003 [1957]. There has been significant revisionist work in the past couple of decades, which calls into question the typically Whiggish and triumphalist historiography of earlier generations on the advances and attainments of early modern science, focusing instead, or in different degrees, on the concerns and aims of the actors in the period themselves. See for example, John Henry, The Scientific Revolution and the Origins of Modern Science, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008; Peter dear, Revolutionizing the Sciences: European Knowledge and Its Ambitions, 1500-1700, Princeton University Press, 2009 [2001]. However, no amount of revision has succeeded in displacing the idea that something of great significance took place in early modern Europe in the way people conceptualized the structure and nature of the external world. Steven Shapin expresses the limits of revisionism very well with the opening sentence of his introductory book on the scientific revolution: “There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution, and this is a book about it” (Shapin, The Scientific Revolution, University of Chicago Press, 1996, 1).

February 18, 2014

I dreamt last night that I was sharing a taxi with Putin from Moscow to Sheremetyevo airport. He was being very friendly and I could tell he liked me. I felt like a coward and a moral cretin for not saying anything critical that would cause him to not like me, and at the same time I kept trying to convince myself that there were strong pragmatic reasons for maintaining good relations, at least for now, as this would enable me to eventually write more revealingly about him. I knew this was bullshit, however, and that I was really just a grovelling sycophantic underling who craved the approval of people in power. Then we got into a massive traffic jam, and I was so filled with self-hatred and dread that I woke up.

In real life I had shared a taxi from Moscow to Sheremetyevo, earlier that same day, with a kind, gentle, architect from Berlin. By 'architect' I mean one of those people from Berlin who talks about 'space' a lot and who participates in panels with philosophers. He has probably never built any buildings, but nor has he blown any up, which is why I am wondering why he got replaced by Putin in my dream.

We had been, earlier in the day, on a panel in front of a few hundred people and a number of angry journalists. We were a motley crew of philosophers and political activists, and to be perfectly honest my reason for accepting the invitation was somewhat disingenuous: it meant an opportunity to go back to Russia after what seems like a lifetime away.

Anyhow there were seething antagonistic dynamics between different parties in the room that I could not even begin to decipher. There was a guy on the panel who looked like a skateboarder but announced himself as a psychoanalyst. There were plenty of the sort of bearded, long-haired Russian men who could be either dissident leftists or ultranationalist Orthodox spiritualists. Many of the people in the room clearly had cults of personality attached to them, but I did not know who they were or in virtue of what the cults had congealed.

There was much talk, more than any westerner could possibly anticipate, of Ukraine, and of popular will, and revolution.

When it came time for questions a man in the audience stood up and said, "I am a doctor of philosophy. First of all, I would like to begin by asking you all to express solidarity with the protesters in Kiev. Long live the Ukrainian Revolution! Long live Maidan!" He held up his fist and yelled "Long live Maidan!" again, and then I and maybe a dozen other people did the same. (Why not? I thought. I too support Maidan.) Then there was an awkward silence, and the journalists were all glancing around to see who expressed solidarity and who kept silent. Would there be repercussions? I wondered.

And then the 'doctor of philosophy' said (to paraphrase): "All you so-called philosophers ought to be ashamed of yourselves. You haven't even mentioned morality once. And that's what philosophers need to be talking about: morality. Here we are in a world where all sorts of unnatural things are happening: capitalism, genetic engineering, same-sex marriage, drugs, and so on. How are we going to put a stop to these things if we don't start taking morality seriously?"

For some reason they decided to pass the microphone to me. My Russian skills, often inaccessible during this short visit, snapped to attention, and I said: "As far as I am concerned it is the sole duty of a philosopher to compare different systems of morality, to attempt to find their weaknesses and inconsistencies, but by no means to defend the one or the other." There was much muttering and nonplussedness.

What are the lessons I am drawing? For one thing, I return convinced more than ever that Russia is far more foreign than westerners are willing to recognize. On this visit I heard, on multiple occasions and from people of all political orientations, the expression of a contrast between 'us' and 'Europe'. In the Soviet period and much earlier, the eternal question was whether 'we' are European or Asian, whereas now there seems to be a resolute and unconflicted commitment to the role of a tertium quid. At the same time, Moscow is indeed clearly more 'Asiatic' than it was 20 years ago, as a result of migration patterns from Central Asia. Restaurant wait-staff, construction workers, and others closer to the bottom of the social ladder are, it seems, far more likely to be named Chingiz than Sergei. One is reminded of how much of the current territory of Russia --not the former USSR, but Russia-- was once covered by khanates.

But the lessons, the lessons. There is a place in the world where same-sex marriage can be plausibly lumped together with GMO's as a sign of a world gone wrong, and indeed as a sign of excessive American power. One disagrees, but still wishes to rub one's western liberal academic friends' faces in it a bit: try to fit this into your pat schemes, into your Facebook echo chambers of mutually assured agreement.

One of the most intense preoccupations of western social media over the past few months is the question how, in spite of the fact that Russia is so terribly homophobic, nonetheless Russian men, and particularly Putin, look so hopelessly gay. The country's leader goes horseback riding with his shirt off, and does so in defense of a purportedly rigorously heteronormative conception of masculinity. What on earth is going on here? It seems to me that there is something even far deeper than homophobia that marks the distance between Russia and the west in these matters, and that is a different relationship to irony, of which, I take it, the 'camp' so lucidly analyzed by Susan Sontag is but a subspecies. In the west it is impossible to simply be a man in the way Russians such as Putin take for granted, since the gestures or styles in which this would consist are continually being taken up by people who would like to subvert, invert, or at least question the process by which something so minor as gestures or styles could ever constitute something so fundamental as identity.

Putin is purportedly a hardbody (if by now tending toward gynecomastia, and really more thick than hard), but his authoritarianism is soft. For comparison, a fascinating list has been circulating of western bands prohibited by Soviet authorities in 1984. Number 1 is 'German-Polish Aggression', which is almost certainly made up. Number 2 is 'German-American Friendship', by which I assume they mean Deutsch-Amerikanische Freundschaft or DAF, which really existed but had nothing to do with the Marshall Plan or geopolitics. Numbers 3-14 are Soviet 'Red Wave' bands (except for one Czech group), and it's not at all surprising to see them on a government blacklist. Then, suddenly, at 15 we get Blue Öyster Cult followed by a number of well-known western groups. The list is fairly clearly composed by clueless government agents, filled with misspellings and misgroupings, e.g., number 44: 'Blondi and Debbia Kharri'. 'Dzhutas Prist', 'Depesh Med', 'Kalche Klub', 'Tokan Khedz' (i.e., Talking Heads), follow no known transliteration scheme. Julio Iglesias comes in at 45, two spots ahead of Black Sabbath, which strongly suggests the numbers are not ordinal. This list is really a nice measure of how much has changed: 'soft' authoritarianism of the sort Putin has perfected doesn't waste time with stuff like this.

And then comes glasnost: I remember, in 1991, seeing a USSR state-run Melodiya vinyl recording of Pearl Jam, released not under the name Пэрл Джем, but rather Жемчужное Варенье, literally, "Pearl Jam," i.e., fruit spread that is made out of pearls. So even with the official policy of openness the state proved as clueless as ever.

Lenin's name is now fading in the marble atop his mausoleum on Red Square. The opening hours have been reduced to 10h-13h weekdays, and apparently for Russian citizens only [Вход для граждан]. Of all former leaders, Lenin seems the hardest to fit into current narratives of national identity. Stalin fits very well, without having to be mentioned by name. The precise species of dictatorship Putin is crafting is definitely not a revolutionary one, of the proletariat, and it's not an omnipresent heavy-handed one either. The propaganda is unrelenting, but as long as you are a powerless nobody you're free to express dissenting opinions as much as you like. I held my fist up in support of the Maidan protestors, one of whose leaders, evidently, Putin recently caused to be tortured. This happened in front of TV cameras. Why didn't more people hold their fists up? Again, I don't know.

I did get 'controlled' for eating an apple while waiting on the metro platform at Revolution Square (a transgression of which I'm guilty in multiple jurisdictions), but when the police saw my American passport they congratulated me for the glorious victory of the US hockey team earlier that day (which was the first I'd heard of it). Instinctively, though, here more than anywhere else I've been, one perceives the police and other officials warily, sensing that protection and service are the furthest thing from their minds. Life as a visible ethnic or sexual minority here would be a life of constant fear.

Nadia and Masha, formerly of Pussy Riot, are out of their Siberian labor camps now, making the rounds of the Colbert Report, Brooklyn, destinations they are surely being drilled to understand. The Guardian recently published an anonymous missive from remaining members of the Pussy Riot collective, disavowing these two for their association with the establishment, and in particular for speaking out in favor of mainstream prisoners' rights groups. One somewhat hopes to see next a super-hardcore faction denouncing these anonymous posers for publishing in the Guardian. I don't care what anyone says. Nadia Tolokonnikova is our era's Aleksandr Radishchev.

I have no patience for westerners who say it is not our place to criticize the Russian regime. I suppose it depends on what you mean by 'we'. I certainly don't see myself in that deployment of the first-person plural pronoun.

I had a friend who spent much of the 1980s in Soviet jails for the crime of circulating bootleg Beatles tapes. He fell off a building and died, drunk, during the 1991 Generals' Putch. His name was Vitaliy Dergachev. I'm on his side.

Western pseudo-left collusionism reached a fever pitch during the Olympics, which just happened to coincide with my recent return to Russia. The respected Russia scholar Stephen F. Cohen, whom I heard speak in the 1990s and I admired very much, wrote recently in The Nation that we are all, essentially, being duped by a lazy western media that is prepared to say more or less anything to make Putin look bad. But if it is true, as Cohen insists, that coverage of Russia is even less subtle than in the Soviet days, this surely follows from the far more general fact of the media's overall decline in the past quarter century, and not from any deepening of the western media's Cold War parti pris.

Cohen maintains that we are naive for going along with the official western line that the Ukrainians 'yearn to be free' and that this automatically means geopolitical alliance with the EU rather than with Russia. He evokes ancestrality: the bloody argument that Rus' was once Kievan, and --therefore?-- that Kiev must remain, if not Russian, then at least Russia-oriented. But this entirely overlooks the fact that the Maidan protesters do not think of themselves as dupes of the CIA or of western propaganda. They are disgusted by corruption and behind-the-scenes manipulation, mostly guided by Russia, and they want to be free of it. What is even more important, this overlooks the fact that almost all dissident Russian progressives (and not just the category-defying fish-fowl who simultaneously oppose gay marriage and GMO's) are in strong solidarity with the Ukrainian protesters: not because they are западник suckers, not because they are pro-western, but because they want Ukraine to realize its right to autonomy and self-determination. As my friend Kirill Medvedev, a prominent figure in the Russian New Left, writes:

Sorry, but I completely seriously think that all progressive humanity should now demand two things: (a) an officially bilingual, bi-ethnic, multicultural Ukraine; (b) the total cessation of interference on the part of Russia in the affairs of that country.

I'm on Kirill's side.

What now about the Olympics? I agree that much of the western snickering and bickering about Sochi has been petty and embarrassing. I have been many places in Eastern Europe where a sign requested that I throw my toilet paper into the waste-paper receptacle, and not, as one might expect, into the toilet. When you travel, you see new things, and you marvel at the variety of the world. When you see them circulating on Tumblr, they're easier to ridicule.

But let us make no mistake: Sochi was an ugly travesty, and it was made possible only by tremendous suffering. Forget about the repression of gays and lesbians, for a moment. In Moscow in the Winter of 2014, two sights are ubiquitous: the Olympic games on giant screens lining public thoroughfares; and migrant laborers from the Caucasus being treated like dirt. A racial hierarchy has emerged over the past two decades in the capital city, where Central Asians are now the tolerated, unthreatening, hard-working minority, while Caucasians occupy the very bottom rung of the social ladder, and are by definition targets of suspicion and exclusion.

Who are the Caucasians, and what is the historical cause of their place in the ethnic hierarchy of Russia? One thing you might notice is that Sochi is located in a region called 'Krasnodar'. It is surrounded by many other administrative divisions that end in -stan, suggesting a Tataro-Turkic influence, and many other divisions that bear some sort of local ethnonym: Ingushetia, Ossetia, etc. Why is Krasnodar not a -stan? Why is Krasnodar not called Adyghia? The answer has in part to do with the fact that it was Russified in the mid-19th century through a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing and genocide. The Circassians were exterminated, or relocated to Turkey. There is still today an active political lobby, based in Turkey, pushing for greater recognition of the Circassian genocide, but its voice is of course muffled by the Olympic juggernaut. In the lead-up to the games, Russian security forces were blowing up family homes around the Krasnodar region, hoping to weed out terrorists who had threatened to make the olympic spectacle their own.

The Americans were worried they'd need to be evacuated in the event of a terrorist attack, but the event of a non-event is, on reflection, no less troubling: a flawless Olympics means, for Putin, the consolidation of symbolic power in a contested part of the Caucasus, power that has seemed perpetually out of reach since at least the early 19th century. The westerners go and have a good time, tell themselves Putin's not so bad after all even if they were made to shit in adjoining toilets at the Black Sea base camp. And brute power wins with the complicity of tacky pageant, and of a grovelling and sycophantic western left, whose best arguments for Putin never amount to anything more than a simple change of subject: Well, they say, it's no worse than what we do.

January 26, 2014

As many readers will already know, there is only a very small number of known scripts that remain entirely undeciphered.

There is, for example, the Rongorongo storyboard of Easter Island, which could very likely have been made up by clever Rapa Nuians in the 19th century in order to flummox the missionaries who had been calling them illiterate. There are the Pictish inscriptions of Scotland, that were only discovered to be writing at all, complete with logograms and syllables and everything, as a result of statistical analysis undertaken by a mere machine. And there are the Tărtăria tablets of Romania, dating to the 6th millennium BCE, which, many argue, is far too early for any writing system and therefore could only have given us representational art so rudimentary and stick-figure-like as to resemble letters as if by chance. The same may be said of the oracle bones of Shang Dynasty China.

But there is another undeciphered script that seldom gets mentioned among these more famous cases: the rumored traces of writing found scattered around the island of Jersey, in the English Channel.

If the Jersey Script is seldom mentioned, this is probably because its existence has not been confirmed by any reputable scholar. In fact, for the past century, the rumors of the script have been dismissed as a complete and total fraud.

As is well known, Jersey is home to under 100,000 inhabitants. They are subjects of the United Kingdom, though the island is historically French. A handful of Jerseyans still speak a variety of Norman French known as Jèrriais, though only metropolitan French is recognized, alongside English, as an official language. Many Jèrriaisspeakers were once formidable whalers and fishermen, and moved in large numbers to Newfoundland at the beginning of the 17th century. In the 1640s King Charles II granted the Jèrriais bailiff George Carteret a large parcel of land between the Delaware and Hudson Rivers. Over time, the settlers who followed him there came to speak an evolved version of Jèrriais that is sometimes called 'Néo-Jèrriais' or New Jerseyan. Although this state has no official tongue, technically, Néo-Jèrriais was the de facto language for administrative, educational, and journalistic communication in New Jersey until well after the Civil War. To this day, students at Princeton University have the option of submitting their written work in Néo-Jèrriais, and of course we are all familiar with the august tradition, at the annual graduation ceremony, of the discourse in that language, held before proud parents, by the graduating cohort's salutatorian.

It goes without saying that it is Princeton that serves as home to the world's most respected Department of Jerseyan and New Jerseyan Studies, and the rare books and manuscripts room of the university library holds the largest and richest trove of documents in these languages. I myself am an amateur Jerseyist, and have attained a fairly high level of proficiency in Néo-Jèrriais (I'm not too humble to admit). So naturally, during the term I spent at Princeton in 2011, I took advantage of the opportunity to go to the library as often as I was able (given all my other responsibilities), and to search through these materials, hoping to find something that would help me to better understand the French legacy in the New World.

Most of what I was able to turn up was curious, but hardly worth dwelling on. There was a scattering of doctoral dissertations written by quirky students over the past several decades who had decided to avail themselves of the right to submit their work in Néo-Jèrriais. Thus for example I read fragments of Henry Guimauve's 1968 thesis, Lè jèrriais dagns l'mousv'megnt ouvriè àmerikaign d'l'egntr-deû-guerres [Jerseyans in the American Labor Movement of the Inter-War Period]. I read some headlines from the Trenton-based newspaper L'Dgide [The Guide], published in Néo-Jèrriaisdaily until 1887 (one article that caught my attention, dating from May 2, 1865, spoke of a "Lèttre inecdytte d'Dgonne Ouilquès Bouthe s'là quàstion d'l'indépamdanç dè néo-jèrriais" ["Newly Discovered Letter from John Wilkes Booth on the Question of New Jerseyan Independence"].

But what struck me most among my many disoveries was the cache of letters written by a certain Guy Le Miel between 1903 and 1907. Le Miel, born in Saint Hellier in 1862, maintained an active correspondence with the Princeton linguist and groundbreaking Jerseyist Quincy Gorman, which dealt with many topics, but which often came back to reports of an undeciphered writing system that had turned up in various spots around the island. Gorman remained far more skeptical than Le Miel, yet he was always prepared to at least entertain the Jerseyan's often outlandish speculations. It appears that in April, 1908, the Princeton professor had grown so intrigued that he made a special trip to the English Channel to observe for himself the samples of writing about which Le Miel had written.

Gorman's trip is already well-known, at least in Jerseyist circles, as he published a summary of it in the scholarly journal Romance Philology (vol. 47, no. 3, October, 1911: pp. 332-334). This short piece is responsible for putting an end to serious inquiry into the Jersey script for the past century, since Gorman came back from the island entirely convinced that Le Miel was a fantasist and that he had led his distinguished guest on a wild goose chase. Gorman does not mince his words in the article: "Monsieur Le Miel led me around from one wooded grove to the next, assuring me always, 'We're sure to find what we're looking for here', or 'Just wait 'til we get to the next hillock, where there's always a new trove of writing that turns up each day'. Truly, I have never seen such pointless chicanery in my long life."

Gorman went on to give a summary of the scholarly evidence for the existence of a Jersey script: "We know that before the various waves of Germanic peoples came to these Channel Islands, they were inhabited by short and dusky Kelts. These may be properly called the aborigenes of Europe, and it was surely a foreshadowing of the eventual conquest of the globe by our own proud race that in ancient times our forefathers had already appropriated all of Europe from its primitive inhabitants-- or at least all but the very most distant fringes of Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Cornwall, and Brittany, where indeed the local people still live out their miserable peat-covered existences just as their ancestors did before them. There is no small debate in the Channel as to how thoroughly those peoples were stamped out by the arrival of the Germanics. On Jersey in particular many residents speak of a small, hairy people --calling them les chevelus--, who live in the most wooded parts of the island, who forage at night, steal chickens from farms, and make fire with sticks. It had been my theory, prior to my visit in 1908, that these people may in fact have thrived until the very latest times, and may have carved stones much in the manner of the Picts. I had earnestly believed that it was to such stones that Le Miel intended to lead me. Nay, indeed, I was sorely mistaken."

Having myself read through Le Miel's letters to Gorman (Gorman's to Le Miel are presumably either somewhere on Jersey, or lost to this world), I now believe that the Princeton professor was fundamentally ignorant of what the Jerseyan amateur scriptologist had written to him. I suspect that Gorman himself was not able to read Jèrriais, though he spent his entire career playing the expert. To put it very simply, Le Miel was not talking about stones.

Consider what he wrote in a letter of April 7, 1904: "Ie suys allez-cherchè d'l'escryturr ç'matijn. Ô qv'beau-jourr p'cherchè d'l'escryturr!" ["I went out looking for writing this morning. O what a beautiful day to go looking for writing!"]. When I first read this, I assumed I was misunderstanding-- Le Miel has a very idiosyncratic system of spelling, one that appears to be mostly of his own invention (though there are some authors with similar quirks from the bailiwick of Minquiers). Fortunately, in his subsequent letter of September 17, he offers a detailed account of what he had meant by 'looking for writing', one that now makes it all make perfect sense to me (I hope you will forgive me for skipping straight to English here; eventually I will publish a critical edition of the Jèrriais, but before I do that I hesitate to make anything available that may contain errors):

I awoke before dawn and headed to the beach. As I descended the path down to the dunes I could still see, flashing before my mind's eye, all the letters that had cluttered my mind the night before. What was it I had been reading? Darwin? Count Tolstoy? The Gita? I couldn't even remember, but whatever it was it had cluttered up my head, prevented me from seeing.

But then, as I approached the water, I saw it: the foam. The infinite bubbles popped in succession, and when I first arrived I could see no pattern. So I sat, and watched, and soon enough Nature's own code came popping through. Unlike Mr. Morse, whose frantic messages are always announced under the haughty name of 'news', she tells me nothing I don't already know, and everything I'll ever need to know.

(There are those who say the ancient Celts had their own system of writing, which they chinked into stones so that the gods would not ignore them, and so that their descendants would venerate them. That may be so. I've seen some stones with such markings myself, but I was unimpressed, and I threw them out into the sea as far as I could.)

The bubbles popped to me, confirmed to me: yes, they said, today is a good day to look for writing. Get thee up to the meadowlands, they said, to the Noir Pré where the orchids bloom. So I ran to the meadowlands with giddy anticipation, and once there I caught my breath and began to search around on the ground, parting the grasses with my hands like they were the hairs of my own head.

And I saw them there. The three-tonged imprint of the Jersey crapaud: an inviting prologue. And a bit further on I saw what I had most hoped to see, and what the bubbles had promised even before I set out, my very favorite of all this island's works: the delicate track-poem [èmpreijnte-poème] of the lesser white-toothed shrew.

There is writing everywhere, Professor Gorman. Please come to visit Jersey, that I might show it to you.